Tech Stack for “Failing Fast”

[Non-scalable stack]

DB: Google Sheets

API: Sheety

Web: Ionic/Framework7

App: Cordova with above

Built and tested with hundreds of daily users, but will be expensive to scale and probably has to replaced at some point.

[Solo-scalable]

Back end/DB: Parse Server + MongoDB Atlas + Heroku. No API needed.

Web: jQuery

App: whatever you know

Built and sold one company with this stack, and done some low budget contracts with this. A little more expensive and buggy to start with, but easy to scale to over a thousand daily users.

The tech stack you already know is best. Rails might be great, but not if you don't already know Ruby or Rails.

That said: avoid "JAM stack". Use a fullstack "batteries including" framework with good documentation and a template project.

When I used to build MVPs for clients I stuck to Ruby on Rails, even though I mostly worked with Python and/or JavaScript on mature products.

Fast to get features usable – as in deciding whether this should be developed further or not based on customer feedback – quickly and the "convention over configuration" aspect makes handover easy.

Laravel (and ecosystem). Basically does everything including billing etc.

The fastest way to fail fast is likely to be just building it using tools at hand and seeing what happens.

Time spent optimizing a tech stack probably delays fast failure unnecessarily because you don't know whether it will fail and how until the experiment happens.

The time to try something different is after failure not before.

Whichever ones you know best