Building a startup from scratch, Summer 2024 edition

If someone were to come to you with six months worth of funding for building a startup, what tools would you use?

Here is my list of tools and platforms that are my top picks for Summer 2024, along with why I choose them. There are also some alternatives I would consider as well.

React - While there are many alternatives that are worth considering, React is the most popular frontend ecosystem. It is relatively easy to find software engineers with React experience or experience in a similar component-based system. You can easily find both frontend and backend tools based around React, as well as alternatives like Vue.js and Svelte.?

Next.js - With React being my preferred frontend ecosystem, Next.js is an easy choice. The developer experience is solid and features like routing are intuitive. Where I have run into pain with Next.js is around app vs. page routing, as well as converting some examples into TypeScript. Despite these challenges, being able to create code that can seamlessly run on the backend or frontend is very powerful. As an alternative, I'm keeping an eye on up-and-coming projects based around HTMX. HTMX does not use React and renders everything server side, but works with a bit of frontend JavaScript to help drive the user experiences people expect to have.

Vercel - Simple deploys and Next.js hosting make Vercel a favorite in my toolkit. While I've yet to take full advantage of its preview environments and other advanced capabilities, Vercel handily meets my core hosting needs for now.

React Native - React Native allows you to leverage existing React skills and apply them in a mobile app context. It allows you to target both iOS and Android without needing to write native code for those platforms. React Native now includes React Native Web too, providing an always up-to-date web version critical for quickly shipping updates across all platforms.

TypeScript - I now advocate for using TypeScript instead of JavaScript whenever possible. It helps you discover potential bugs and issues up front. The type definitions and interfaces also provide a natural way of documenting the intent of your code aside from writing comments. It does take some getting used to – fixing "non-issues" can be frustrating early on. But the long-term benefits make TypeScript worth the initial annoyances.

Tailwind or Material UI - For styling, both popular utilities like Tailwind and established component libraries like Material UI remain viable options depending on my needs and collaborators' preferences. Designers I've worked with either tend to favor Material UI or leave the decision up to frontend engineers. I find that MUI is good at getting something consistent out of the box, if possibly boring. Frontend engineers tend to prefer Tailwind. New AI-powered tools from Vercel around Tailwind and Shadcn may tip this in favor of Tailwind when starting a project solo or without design support.

GitHub Copilot - AI-assisted coding has become indispensable, with GitHub's Copilot leading the way. Beyond basic autocomplete, it excels at applying repetitive edits across multiple areas. The chat functionality is well-tuned on different open-source tools and gives good advice. One drawback with Copilot is the small context window size, which is far less of an issue with Claude and ChatGPT. For instance, you can paste a large JSON payload into Claude, tell it to generate some code based on that payload, and get something reasonable back. The same cannot be said for Copilot. But having Copilot integrated into VSCode helps me stay in the flow better. You can also mix and match in cases where Copilot falls short: start by having Claude break a problem down, then fine-tune the results in VSCode.

OpenAI - For implementing AI-based solutions, OpenAI’s API has the most features available. But given how rapidly this landscape is changing, I would definitely consider Anthropic and other vendors depending on the use case.

Supabase - Providing a compelling "open source Firebase alternative" is an understatement. Supabase offers a full PostgreSQL database with automatically generated APIs for database interactions. Authentication, file storage, edge functions and more are all bundled in one integrated backend solution. The AI-powered SQL assistant also makes it easy to author complex queries quickly. The platform has developed to the point that I happily use it as my “app server.”

Slack - No startup toolkit would be complete without Slack. Beyond the core messaging, I rely on Slack's endless customization possibilities - from RSS feed ingestion to dedicated email inboxes per channel. Canvases also minimize internal emails. Slack is mission control.

Sentry - Sentry's error monitoring surfaces the insights I need to quickly identify and resolve issues. Its reasonable pricing and setup make it an easy step-up.

Linear - For lightweight issue tracking and Kanban-style roadmapping, Linear gets the job done without bogging me down in overly complex project management. Its GitHub integration also keeps work seamlessly connected.

Render - For hosting application servers, workers or other cloud services outside of Vercel's serverless paradigm, Render is an affordable and dependable choice.

Google Workspace - It’s a good catchall service for external communication. Most SaaS offerings also have a “Login with Google” option, so this helps you cut down on passwords and extensive access control issues. When your startup grows, you may find yourself needing to use alternatives for some of the components (e.g., Zoom instead of Google Meet), but Google Workspace is more than enough when you are starting out.

So those are my recommendations. What are you using?