What should my tech stack look like at the end of year one?

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Accepted Answer

At the end of a first year the stack should be smaller than most owners expect, and the measure of whether it is right is not what it contains but whether you could hand it to somebody else and have them operate the business. Roughly eight to twelve tools covers nearly every first year business, and anything substantially beyond that usually reflects accumulation rather than requirement.

The foundation layer should be boring and owned by you. A domain registered in your name, separately from hosting. Email on that domain through an established provider. Accounting software connected to a business bank account. A password manager holding everything. And a backup that has been tested by restoring something. Those five are the pieces where failure is expensive and where switching later is painful, so they should be dull, widely used, and independently replaceable.

The operating layer is whatever runs the actual work: a website you can edit yourself, a way to record customers and enquiries, a way to take payment, and whatever is specific to your trade. The requirement here is that each holds data you can export and that none of them depends on a single person's account. If your booking system is registered to a personal email, that is a foundation problem wearing an operating layer disguise.

Measurement should exist and be minimal. Analytics installed with conversion tracking actually configured, and a search console verified. Most first year businesses have the first without the second, which means they can count visits and cannot count outcomes, and that is the gap that makes every marketing decision a guess.

What should have been removed by now is the accumulation. Tools subscribed to for one project, duplicates doing the same job, free tiers of things nobody opens, and anything registered to a contractor. The end of year one is the natural moment for that audit, and it usually returns more than any addition would.

The document that should exist alongside all of it is a list: every tool, what it does, what it costs, which account it is billed to, and who has access. That page is what makes the stack transferable, and it is the difference between a business with systems and a business where one person happens to know where everything is.

Check what each tool costs annually rather than monthly, and total it. Small monthly subscriptions are individually easy to justify and collectively surprising, and most owners have never seen the yearly figure in one place. That number, set against what the stack actually enables, is usually the most persuasive argument for removing two or three things that survived on the basis that each was only a small amount.

What should my tech stack look like at the end of year one?

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