My Take on CI/CD Pipelines as a Startup CTO: The Good, the Bad, and the Balancing Act
- muhammadzeeshan020
- Mar 16
- 4 min read
Hey there—I’m the CTO of a startup 36ZERO Vision GmbH, and I’ve spent the last couple of years wrestling with the chaos and excitement of building something from scratch. One question that keeps popping up: should we go all-in on CI/CD pipelines? You know, those slick automated systems that promise to make development a breeze? I’ve got some thoughts on the pros and cons, straight from my own journey—especially when it comes to juggling an MVP with the big-picture stuff like scalability and processes.
The Early Grind: Shipping the MVP and Figuring Out What Matters
When we kicked off 36ZERO Vision, my co-founder and I were obsessed with one thing: getting our Minimum Viable Product out the door. We weren’t chasing perfection—we just wanted to know if our crazy idea could actually help people. For us, that meant late nights coding, quick manual deploys, and a lot of coffee. Customer value was everything; we lived for that first “aha!” from a user.
Why CI/CD Was a Win Back Then:
Speed Saved Us: Early on, I set up a basic CI pipeline—think automated unit tests on every pull request. It caught dumb mistakes (like that time I forgot a semicolon and broke everything), letting us iterate fast and keep users happy.
Less Panic: With two developers and a duct-taped server, knowing our code wouldn’t explode on deploy was a sanity-saver.
Feedback Loops: We could push fixes based on user gripes in hours, not days. That mattered when we had ten beta testers breathing down our necks.
Where CI/CD Felt Like a Drag:
Setup Sucked: I spent a weekend configuring GitHub Actions when I could’ve been building our login page. It felt like overkill when we were still proving our concept.
Too Much for Too Little: Our team was tiny—me and one other dev. A full pipeline with staging environments? We didn’t need that when a git push got us live.
Cash Crunch: We were bootstrapping, and even free-tier CI tools came with a learning tax I wasn’t thrilled to pay.
My takeaway? Keep it lean in the MVP phase. I stuck to basic CI because it gave us speed without bogging us down. But I didn’t lose sleep over a fancy CD setup—our job was to ship, learn, and survive those first few months.
Scaling Up: When CI/CD Became My Best Friend (and Sometimes My Headache)
Fast forward a bit—36ZERO Vision got traction. Suddenly, we had real users, a growing team, and a product that couldn’t crash every other Tuesday. That’s when I started thinking seriously about CI/CD, security, and scalability. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing.
Why CI/CD Started Paying Off:
No More Chaos: With seven devs onboard, manual deploys were a mess. CI/CD brought order—consistent builds, automated tests, and deployments I didn’t have to babysit.
Scaling Made Sense: We paired our pipeline with some Azure magic (auto-scaling groups, load balancers—the works). Horizontal scaling saved us when a marketing campaign spiked traffic overnight.
Security Wake-Up Call: After a scare with a dodgy dependency, I added automated scans to the pipeline. Knowing we weren’t shipping vulnerabilities was a huge relief.
Staying Competitive: Users loved our quick feature drops. CI/CD let us roll out a new dashboard in a week—something our clunky rivals couldn’t touch.
Where It Got Messy:
Time Sink: Building a pipeline with staging, prod, and security checks took weeks. I had to pull a dev off a customer-facing feature, which stung.
Overkill Temptation: I almost went overboard—multi-region deploys, performance tests, you name it. Then I remembered we had 100 users, not 1 million.
Team Friction: New hires grumbled about learning our pipeline. I had to simplify it so we weren’t drowning in process.
Here’s where I learned to prioritize. Customers still came first—if they wanted a feature, that trumped my dream of a bulletproof pipeline. But once downtime cost us a big client, I knew infrastructure wasn’t optional anymore.
My Balancing Act: MVP vs. Infrastructure vs. Sanity
Looking back, the tug-of-war between MVP and CI/CD is brutal. Early on, I ignored the pipeline hype and focused on users—probably why we’re still alive. But as we grew, I couldn’t dodge scalability forever. Here’s how I keep it together:
Start Small, Grow Smart: Basic CI got us through the MVP days. I added CD and security scans only when the pain of not having them hit hard.
Users Call the Shots: If feedback says our app’s clunky, I’m not tweaking Jenkins—I’m fixing the app. Business value keeps the lights on.
Scale When It Hurts: I didn’t prep for a million users on day one. But when our server choked at 1,000, I doubled down on CI/CD and infra.
Keep It Human: Processes are great, but I’d rather chat with my team than bury them in docs. Agility’s our edge.
Wrapping Up: My Two Cents
As 36ZERO Vision's CTO, CI/CD’s been a rollercoaster. It’s a lifesaver for speed and growth, but it can suck you into a rabbit hole if you’re not careful. In the MVP phase, I’d tell my past self to focus on customers and keep tools simple. As we scale, it’s about picking the right moments to invest—always tying it back to what keeps users happy and the business thriving.
That’s my story. Build fast, listen hard, and scale when you’re ready. It’s worked for us—so far!