“We want to invest €80,000 in the launch campaign for this new app, and we want to be sure the product can onboard 1,000 new customers per day.” – This is a common message from startup investors.
This is Carlos Salgado, technology and cybersecurity auditor. Investors and partners ask: “Can you take a look at this company to see if they are really ready to go live in production?” It is a fascinating job, because it allows seeing and sharing the passion of entrepreneurs, their ideas, and that fire burning inside, eager to go out into the world.
Startups tend to focus on the product, on the MVP, and usually neglect scalability. There is a false belief that design is a “luxury” for when there is budget. The reality is that poor design is one of the fastest ways to burn cash, lose users, and jeopardize the entire project.
1. Flawed database design
Many teams design thinking about the “now” and not about integrity. Unnormalized tables, missing critical indexes, or poorly structured relationships which, as soon as data volume grows, degrade performance to the point of making the platform unmanageable.
2. Broken logging: the invisible trail
A poorly designed logging system is a double danger: either it records sensitive information (such as passwords, personal data, or tokens in plain text), violating privacy, or it is so generic that, when an incident occurs, it offers no traceability. You lose control and may be breaking data protection laws and exposing yourself to million-euro fines.
3. Concentrated knowledge
When the architecture design resides exclusively in one person’s head and there is no technical documentation, the startup has an existential risk. If that person leaves or falls ill, the system becomes a black box that is impossible to manage.
4. Poor monitoring (flying blind)
Designing a product without telemetry is like piloting a plane without an instrument panel. If you find out your system is down because a customer writes to you on Twitter, your operations design has failed.
5. Lack of “Security by Design”
If security is added at the end as a “patch”, the design has failed. Authentication flows and handling of sensitive data must be integrated into the user experience organically, not as a last-minute obstacle.
6. “Paper” contingency and backup plans
Design must include recovery. There are startups with backups that have never been tested (restore tests) or that are stored on the same server as production data. If there is no real contingency plan, the design is incomplete.
“We don’t know how to restore old data without losing the new data; every minute that passes it gets more complicated.”
7. Neglected admin panels (backoffice)
Most of the investment goes to the public-facing side and little to the internal tool. A poorly designed admin panel enables catastrophic human errors, such as the accidental deletion of databases or information leaks due to lack of visual hierarchy.
8. Over-reliance on the client side
Designing interfaces that handle critical business logic in the user’s browser. As an auditor, this is the first thing to look for: if the interface allows bypassing validations that should occur on the server, the design is a security hole.
9. Silos between product design and infrastructure
Designing interfaces that require constant, heavy requests to the API without considering latency or compute cost. System resources cannot be exhausted during peak hours.
10. The technological “Frankenstein” (too many plugins and an inconsistent stack)
This is the tendency to solve every small problem by adding a plugin, an external library, or a new database just because it is trendy. As an auditor, this is a red flag: every plugin is a dependency that can become obsolete, a potential backdoor, and an extra layer of complexity that slows down the system. A robust design is usually minimalist; if you can solve it with your own clean code, do not introduce a third-party black box that might stop being supported tomorrow.
Bonus track
Design is not the wrapping of the gift; it is the gift itself. In a startup, good design is your cheapest competitive advantage if it is done right from the beginning.
Lately people ask about including AI in startups. For me, it is as if someone said: “I’ve brought a family to live in my house, what do I have to do to make it work well?”. Well, it depends on so many factors that it is impossible to give a generic answer. Still, happy to help in each particular case. Reach out if you have any specific questions.
Please do not expose your project to a premature death due to bottlenecks, security flaws, or non-compliance with regulations. Prevention is much more cost-effective.
Maybe you have come across these or other mistakes. What has your experience been? Share it in the comments.
#Startups #ProductDevelopment #Delbion #TechFounders #SoftwareDevelopment #Cybersecurity
Call us to assess the status of your project.
