Technical architecture choices for shipping fast

Speed as a competitive advantage

When you're building multiple ventures, your technical architecture is a competitive moat. Get it right, and you ship products in weeks. Get it wrong, and you're rewriting the same auth flow for the third time.

Here's what we've learned about building for speed.

The stack

Next.js + TypeScript: Server components, file-based routing, and built-in API routes. We don't overthink this. Next.js has become the obvious choice for product-focused teams.

Tailwind CSS: We style everything with Tailwind. No CSS-in-JS debates, no styled-components, no emotion. Utility-first CSS means we move fast and designs stay consistent.

Postgres + Prisma: Relational data, type-safe queries, easy migrations. We've tried NoSQL and always come back to Postgres. It just works.

Vercel for hosting: Zero-config deployments, edge functions, and automatic previews. We push to main, and it's live. Simple.

What we share

Every venture starts with our "launch template":

• Authentication (magic links + OAuth)
• Payment processing (Stripe)
• Email system (transactional + marketing)
• Analytics (PostHog for product, Plausible for marketing)
• Error tracking (Sentry)

This foundation saves 4-6 weeks per product. When we start a new venture, we're building features from day one, not setting up infrastructure.

What we don't share

Each venture has its own repository and own database. Monorepos sound appealing, but they create coupling. We'd rather duplicate code than block a team because another venture is refactoring something.

Independence means each team can move at their own pace. One product can upgrade to React 19 while another stays on 18. There's no coordination tax.

The rules

TypeScript everywhere: No exceptions. The time saved debugging type errors pays for itself in the first week.

No premature optimization: We build for current scale, not future scale. Vercel handles 100k users just fine. We'll worry about sharding when we're actually there.

Boring technology: We use proven tools. No beta frameworks, no experimental databases. Boring is fast.

The results

ChippedPaws (marketplace): 3 weeks from first commit to user testing. ZeroStack (developer tools): 2 weeks from concept to private beta. This website: 4 days from template to production.

The secret isn't working harder. It's removing all the decisions that slow you down. Choose your stack once, build reusable components, and ship relentlessly.

That's how we compete with teams 10x our size.