Boilerplates vs Custom: How to Build Your MVP

Every founder faces this moment: staring at a blank IDE, deciding whether to start with a boilerplate or build everything from scratch.

It's a decision that feels monumental. Should you use pre-built foundations that get you moving quickly, or craft every component yourself for complete control? The choice seems to define what kind of founder you are: pragmatic or perfectionist, shortcut-taker or craftsperson.

The reality is more complex than either side is willing to admit.

Across Slack channels, forum threads, and coffee shop conversations, one thing stands out: most of these debates are driven by a fundamental misunderstanding. Founders treat this as a technical decision when it's really a business strategy question in disguise.

Here's what I mean.

The Real Question Nobody’s Asking

Most teams approach this choice asking: “What’s the best way to build my MVP?”

That’s the wrong question.

The right question is: “What’s the fastest way to find out if customers want what I’m building?”

Notice the difference? One focuses on building. The other focuses on learning.

This shift isn’t just semantics, it’s supported by research. According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail because there’s no market need. The longer you spend polishing infrastructure before testing demand, the more risk you’re taking.

That’s why speed matters. Techniques like smoke tests, landing page signups, and lightweight prototypes consistently validate assumptions faster (and cheaper) than coding everything from scratch.

When your goal is learning, not building, the boilerplate vs. custom debate becomes clearer. A boilerplate isn’t just about saving engineering hours—it’s about shortening the feedback loop so you can test real customer behavior before investing heavily.

The real advantage? You avoid sinking months into solving the wrong problem, and you keep the flexibility to pivot while the stakes are low.

Why Developers Resist Boilerplates

There's something unsatisfying about using pre-built solutions when you know you could create something better. It's like being a chef who uses pre-made sauce or a writer who uses story templates. It feels like cheating.

Developers want to understand systems completely, to know how every piece works and why. Using a boilerplate means accepting someone else's architectural decisions, their trade-offs, their assumptions about what matters.

That lack of complete understanding creates anxiety. What if the boilerplate has security vulnerabilities you don't know about? What if it can't scale the way you need? What if it makes assumptions that don't fit your use case?

These are legitimate concerns. But they're also often misplaced during the MVP stage.

Your MVP isn't your final architecture. It's an experiment designed to test whether your business idea has merit. The most elegant custom solution in the world is worthless if it proves nobody wants what you're selling.

When Custom Development Makes Sense

If you're building something that requires unusual architecture (real-time collaboration, complex data processing, specialized performance requirements) you might not find a boilerplate that fits. Trying to force a square peg into a round hole often takes longer than building the right solution from scratch.

If you're in a highly regulated industry with specific compliance requirements, you might need custom implementations that handle your particular constraints. Financial services, healthcare, and government applications often have requirements that general-purpose boilerplates don't address.

If you have experienced developers who can build quality infrastructure quickly and you have the timeline and budget to support custom development, it might be the right choice for your situation.

But here's what I've observed: founders almost always overestimate how unique their requirements are and underestimate how much time custom development will take.

The Hidden Cost of Perfect Code

Custom development has a hidden cost that most founders don't fully appreciate: the sunk cost fallacy.

When you've spent months building something from scratch, you become emotionally invested in that architecture. Even when customer feedback suggests you need to change direction, it's psychologically difficult to abandon code you've lovingly crafted.

Boilerplates create less emotional attachment. You didn't build the authentication system, so you're less resistant to replacing it if customers need something different. You didn't architect the database schema, so you're more willing to modify it based on actual usage patterns.

This emotional distance is actually a feature, not a bug. It keeps you focused on what customers need rather than what you've already built.

Finding the Right Balance

The way I see it, founders don't really choose between boilerplates and custom development—they choose different levels of each depending on the part of the application.

Use boilerplates for commodity functionality that doesn't differentiate your product. Authentication, payment processing, user management, email systems (these are solved problems that customers expect to just work). Services like Auth0 for authentication and Stripe for payments have become industry standards for good reason. Unless your competitive advantage somehow depends on having a unique approach to user login, don't reinvent the wheel.

Build custom solutions for the features that make your product unique and valuable. The specific workflows, data processing, integrations, or user experiences that solve your customers' particular problems (this is where your development time creates actual business value).

When you're evaluating options, look for platforms that offer real value, whether that's popular choices like ShipFast and Supastarter, or newer options like Two Cents Software's Starter Kit that let you launch way faster with a reliable tech stack. The key is finding something that handles the "boring" infrastructure while giving you flexibility to build what actually matters.

This balanced approach lets you move quickly while maintaining control over what differentiates your product. You get the speed benefits of proven solutions for standard functionality and the customization benefits of purpose-built code for unique requirements.

What Success Actually Looks Like

Successful MVPs aren't defined by their technical architecture, they're defined by how quickly they help you understand your market and iterate based on customer feedback.

Consider Dropbox's famous MVP approach. Drew Houston didn't build a complex file synchronization system first. He created a simple 3-minute demo video showing files magically appearing across different computers. No actual sync technology existed yet – it was essentially smoke and mirrors.

The video generated thousands of signups overnight. People desperately wanted what they thought they saw, even though the underlying technology wasn't built yet. Only after proving demand did the team focus on building the actual file synchronization infrastructure.

Compare that to many beautifully architected custom applications that fail because they solve problems nobody cares about. Technical elegance doesn't translate to business success if customers don't want the solution.

The key insight is that Dropbox focused on proving people wanted seamless file synchronization before building the complex technology to deliver it. The demo was "inferior" from a technical standpoint but superior for learning what customers actually valued.

The Decision Framework That Works

Here's how to think about this choice practically:

Start with your learning goals, not your building preferences. What's the riskiest assumption about your business that needs testing? How quickly can you test it? What's the minimum viable implementation that would give you meaningful customer feedback?

Evaluate boilerplates based on how well they support rapid experimentation and iteration, not just how complete or elegant they are. Can you modify them easily when you learn something new? Do they handle the basics reliably so you can focus on your unique value proposition?

Choose custom development only when boilerplates genuinely can't support your core functionality or market learning goals. Be honest about whether your requirements are actually unique or just feel unique because you haven't looked carefully at existing solutions.

Plan for evolution, not perfection. Your MVP architecture will change as you learn more about your customers and market. Choose approaches that make iteration easier, even if they're not your ideal long-term solution.

The goal isn't to build the perfect product (it's to learn what the perfect product should be, as quickly and efficiently as possible). Everything else is just details.

Your customers don't care whether you built your authentication system from scratch. They care whether your product solves their problems better than the alternatives. Keep that in mind, and the boilerplate vs custom choice becomes much clearer.