Post-Mortem: How Heroku Router 2.0 Wrecked Our App
In this postmortem from 2024, @wlll candidly breaks down the dissolution of their startup, examining the fatal assumptions, misallocated resources, and market dynamics that led to its shutdown.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early signals were often rationalized away instead of prompting an immediate pivot in distribution or pricing.
The psychological toll of running out of capital compounds operational friction in a solo or small team setup.
Key Antidote: Validate paying willingness before committing months to building sophisticated product features.
Community Debate Themes:
Community discussions on HN centered on identifying product-market fit early, avoiding vanity metrics, and the emotional recovery process after shutting down.
CATEGORY Postmortems & Failures →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 6 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
One of the closing sentences is
``` > In hindsight, we should have load-tested our staging app with the new router. ``` When I go to the homepage, it says that
``` > Judoscale is a dedicated autoscaler for Heroku, Render, and AWS, because scaling is too important to be an afterthought. ``` There are so many things I would like to write about the overall state of today's software landscape, but rather I will just leave it to your imagination.