How a founder lost $300K and 18 months:
Just on a rebuild that should not have happened.
The founder had a working SaaS product. 50 paying customers. $8K MRR. Built on PHP and MySQL.
A "senior developer" convinced him the stack was outdated. That they had to rebuild in Go and MongoDB to scale properly.
18 months later:
→ $300K spent on development → Zero new features shipped → Lost 30 customers due to stagnation → MRR dropped to $3K → Original developer quit mid-project
Hard fact: The PHP app could have scaled to 10K users without breaking a sweat. They needed optimization. Not a full rebuild.
Most rebuilds are ego projects. Not business decisions.
Ask yourself what problem you are actually solving.