“Just hack a quick proof of concept, we’ll rebuild it when we get more funding.” These are some words I often hear from clients who have minimal budgets.

They generally want my team to build something small/quick/cheap to get their concept across in hopes of securing more funds down the road.

What I have learned by saying “yes” to these types of requests in the past is, those quickly hacked prototypes often end up in production.

While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s sometimes problematic if we viewed the code as disposable up front. Normally, a client will have you ship a prototype and then will want to quickly iterate. If you are not careful, you will soon accrue technical debt and eventually sour your relationship with the client due to underperforming.

So, if you are ever asked to do a quick prototype, do yourself a favor and treat it as if it will be production-ready from day one. You never know how long you will be supporting it.