SaaS Platform Greenfield Build

The Challenge

A 3-person founding team had a validated business idea and pre-sales conversations underway, but no engineering team and no technical co-founder. They needed to move from wireframes to a production system fast enough to close their seed round.

Approach

Rather than hiring a full team immediately, we started with a lean architecture that could be operated by one or two engineers and extended as the team grew.

Key decisions:

• Monolith first — a well-structured monolith is easier to operate and iterate on than microservices at this stage
• Managed services — RDS, ElastiCache, and SES rather than self-hosted equivalents
• GitHub Actions CI/CD — simple, free, and sufficient for the deployment cadence needed
• Structured for extraction — the monolith was built with clear domain boundaries, making future service extraction straightforward

The Stack

React SPA (CloudFront + S3)
      ↓
Node.js API (ECS Fargate)
      ↓
PostgreSQL (RDS Multi-AZ) + Redis (ElastiCache)

A simple, proven stack. No exotic choices that would make hiring harder or create single points of knowledge.

Outcome

The platform launched to the first 5 pilot customers in week 12. By week 16, it was handling real workloads from 15 paying customers. The founders closed a £1.8M seed round six weeks after launch, with product traction as the primary evidence.

Eighteen months later the platform serves 200+ customers and the engineering team has grown to 12. The monolith is still running — and still the right choice at this stage of the business.