I appreciate your response! Thanks for sharing your opinion in such a detailed way!

Yep, that’s one of the points here, that KISS should be a top priority when building MVP. I think the lack of entrepreneurship experience drove a complicated solution. Though, when we were building, there were much less oss projects than now.

And as I mentioned in another comment, we had a very good microservice template and strong experience in building microservices architecture, so there was very little overhead against monolithic architecture. The most amount of time was invested in the business logic, and providers integration/negotiations anyway. But this is completely our use case, probably if I met another engineer first, we may have chosen monolithic approach. I don’t think that would make a big difference. Microservices (the same could be achieved in a good monolith of course) gave us a good separation of concerns and a very high speed at adapting to pivoting.

Also the major part of costs were non technical like marketing and sales. And here you are completely right. We had to invest much more time into proving the concept, you may not have an MVP completely, no sales team, just do good designs in figma, make few videos, try to find leads, and start building only after that. But I joined when things already started to move.

The good thing is if I will ever get to similar situation, I would have a very strong argument against building the solution from day one. And I would be able to convince my partners next time with much higher chances.