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I'm a non-technical founder developing a karaoke mobile app. How I should architect my app in term of software/servers used and programming languages?

I need help engineering the software with all technicality. What server should I use to obtain the best audio-streaming and scalability?

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José Luis

Clarity Expert

Better than choose an architecture and try to build the server side of your app, I suggest you to try to find a mate that helps you and was your cofounder. Just you will probably fail in building the app and keeping it working fine in the near future. One-founder teams are very risky for accelerators and VCs. So, you definitely should trust in a co-founder. Read this: http://venturehacks.com/articles/pick-cofounder

Answered over 9 years ago

Austin Church

Build a profitable business you love.

A hundred different engineers would answer that question a hundred different ways. Software engineers have styles and preferences, just like musicians. One swears by Ruby on Rails. Another works exclusively with a MEAN stack. Here's the elephant in the room: if you're a non-technical founder, you can't answer your question for yourself, and you likely won't understand the answer that a technologist gives you. You're not an architect, so what can you do with a blueprint? A better question might be, "What is the best way for a non-technical founder to develop software?" To that question, I would respond, hire a CTO-type to consult with you, architect your app, and hire a junior developer to build the thing. Here's a blog post that has more details on this approach: http://blog.closeup.fm/2014/01/24/how-to-hire-a-php-developer/.

Answered over 9 years ago

JC Garrett

Helping you plan/execute tech & sales strategies

Oftentimes the "best" solution is what would be most familiar and usability by the person/people build and supporting the application. In addition to what some of the other responses post, I would also offer that "best" server solutions in this instance may also include how best to scale storage costs and scale users so the application doesn't experience any lag or latency issues with accessing and streaming content. Part of this too will depend on your growth plan and how quickly you expect to need to scale the platform.

Regarding programming languages, there are really only 2 considerations you have to make: 1) for the back-end, there are a myriad of options you can use (again, I would make the focus using a language that is scalable in terms of your ability to recruit talent to build out and support it instead of necessarily advocating Ruby on Rails over say PHP or Python). 2) for the front-end, the only consideration to make for native applications would be utilizing Objective C or Swift (or a combo of both) for iOS. Swift is the newer language and rolled out by Apple, however they will likely never (or not for a long time) move away from allowing Objective C such a huge % of the current apps in market are based in it. So, I would also default this response to a consideration of who you are recruiting to build it versus optimal coding of one language versus another.

There are however some generally steps you can take for your tech team to give them ideas on your blueprint and know where to start for recruitment. So from that standpoint, building a technical specifications document outlining wireframes/front-end and also back-end requirements may be helpful towards organizing your thoughts. Feel free to reach out if I can answer any other questions or if you want to discuss how to build out a technical spec doc.

Answered over 9 years ago