dan hughes' weblog

Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

Here’s a surefire way to spark a heated discussion —- ask a bunch of technology entrepreneurs what they think is the best technology stack on which to build your company. I did this over and over again before I building StorageByMail.com. There are those who will make a very compelling case for Ruby on Rails, while others will swear by PHP, Python, or even Microsoft ASP.NET. Can Rails scale? Is Microsoft evil? Is the Python developer community robust? I’ve heard all of the arguments and I still can’t answer a single one of these questions. Nor can I tell you what is the best technology stack. But I had a decision to make. I went with Microsoft ASP.NET (and C#), a technology that would rank about one notch above Cobol if one were to rank technologies according to coolness. Here’s why I made the choice I did:

I don’t have a computer science background and as a newbie I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation, the developer community and the quality of its IDE (Visual Studio). These things are important if you’re a beginner.
Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. If you go the open source route you have to compete with the all the cool kids (Tumblr, Etsy, etc) for talent whereas with Microsoft products you’re competing with Dundler Mifflin. It’s not about the quality of the talent. It’s a simple supply and demand question.
An exit strategy should to some extent inform your technology decisions. In the case of StorageByMail we’re far more likely to catch the eye of Public Storage or Fedex than Google or Facebook. I made a list of likely acquirers and then looked at what kind of programming skills they hire for. It was clear they all favor Microsoft. All things being equal it seemed logical to do the same.
Upon examining my own personal network I realized that I had a good support network of C# programmers to rely upon. And I knew that I was going to be asking them a lot of dumb questions when I ran into trouble. So I might as well work in their language of choice.

At the end of the day things just have to work and customers don’t give a shit what technology you built your site on. Make a choice and move on. Looking back it’s probably one of the least significant decisions I’ve made to date (though I do admittedly have a minor case of Rails envy).