The Journal
The notes I would have wanted at fifteen.
Long-form notes on shipping production systems, scaling SaaS, hiring engineers, AI integration, and the engineering decisions behind Yashveer Labs — written by founder Yashveer Singh.
When to Refactor an MVP and When to Throw It Away
Most founders ask whether to refactor or rewrite too late, when the codebase has already become expensive to change. I look at three signals: whether the architecture can support the next six months of features, whether the team who built it is still available, and whether the cost of change is growing or holding steady. Two signals pointing at rewrite usually means rewrite.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsThe Three Document Pack Every Founder Owes Their Developer
The three document pack is a product brief, a scope contract, and a user flow map. Together they give a developer everything they need to build the right thing without a daily check in from the founder. Without them, the developer fills the gaps with assumptions. Some of those assumptions are correct. The ones that are not will cost more to fix than the documents would have cost to write.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsThe Lean MVP Stack for 2026: What I Use for Client Projects
The lean MVP stack is a set of opinionated technology choices designed to minimize the time from idea to working product in the hands of real users. The criteria for inclusion: the tool must eliminate a category of infrastructure work (auth, payments, email, deployment), must have a generous free tier that covers the MVP phase, must be well-documented enough that a solo developer can ship without support tickets, and must not create significant lock-in that makes the post-MVP phase expensive. In 2026, the stack I use for most client projects is Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, Resend, and Vercel.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsThe Over Engineering Trap: How Founders Kill Their Own Products
Over engineering happens when the system being built is more complex than the problem being solved. On an MVP, it usually shows up as microservices before product fit, abstractions before real use cases, or infrastructure that assumes ten thousand users when there are ten. I have seen it slow projects by months and bankrupt one startup before a single customer signed up.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsWhy Most MVPs Never Launch: The Real Reasons
Most MVPs that never launch died in the planning phase, not the build phase. From my client work and rescue projects, the pattern is consistent: scope that was never defined clearly enough to build, a founder who kept adding to it, a developer who kept agreeing, and a timeline that kept slipping until the money or the will ran out. The technical reasons are almost always downstream of these four.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsValidate Your App Idea Before Spending Fifty Thousand on Development
Validation before development means generating real signal about whether people will use and pay for your product before you spend the money to build it. Not surveys, not guesses, not friends saying it sounds cool. Real signal is a stranger who found the landing page through search, typed in their email, and then answered three specific follow up questions about the problem you are solving.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsThe MVP Feature Checklist: What to Build, What to Cut, and Why
The MVP feature checklist is the set of criteria for deciding which features belong in an MVP and which should be deferred. The core criterion is hypothesis testing: the MVP should include the minimum set of features required to test whether the product hypothesis is true. Features that users would enjoy but that do not test the hypothesis are deferred. Features that are required for the hypothesis test to be valid are included, even if they are expensive to build. The failure mode is building features that are nice to have rather than hypothesis testing, producing an expensive MVP that does not answer the core question faster than a cheap one would have.