In Singapore’s hyper-competitive start-up ecosystem, the thing holding you back probably isn’t your product or your team. It’s infrastructure.
I’ve seen it again and again. Experienced teams with strong ideas hit walls not because their market isn’t there, but because their systems can’t scale, can’t move fast enough, or can’t stay within budget.
Infrastructure is often treated as a technical afterthought. But it has direct consequences for delivery velocity, burn rate, team productivity, and even investor confidence.
In real terms, bad infra often looks like:
- Long deployment lead times
- Systems that can’t scale as usage spikes
- Cloud spend that eats into runway
- Engineers firefighting instead of building
- Architecture that makes due diligence harder for investors
These aren’t abstract issues. They show up in real, measurable ways.
(Note to reader: if your team’s already running into challenges like these, you may want to skip ahead. I’m offering a free infrastructure review for Singapore start-ups. It’s a quick, no-obligation session to spot bottlenecks, cut waste, and make sure your systems can scale when it counts. Details at the end of this article.)
Take Carousell. They moved fast but also invested early in scalable infrastructure. This helped them to support millions of listings and users across Southeast Asia. And that foundation let them expand rapidly and raise over USD $280 million.
Then, there’s Honestbee. Despite early momentum, underlying operational and tech issues became critical weaknesses. Scaling problems, inefficient infrastructure, and neglected fundamentals contributed to their collapse.
I’ve seen both stories play out. The difference often comes down to technical choices made early on.
Infrastructure isn’t just a back-end concern. It can make or break your ability to grow at the most critical points in your journey.
Let me show you where I’ve seen things go wrong, and what some Singapore start-ups have done to fix it.
Speed needs structure
Speed is the name of the game. But speed without structure is chaos (and chaos doesn’t scale).
That’s why CI/CD (continuous integration and deployment) and DevOps practices are so important. They help teams move quickly, without compromising quality or reliability.
According to the Accelerate State of DevOps report, teams using mature DevOps practices:
- Deploy 208x more frequently
- Recover from failures 24x faster
For start-ups trying to win their first 100 customers or prepare for Series A, that kind of velocity can make the difference.
And you don’t need a large engineering team to get there. With the right setup (using tools like GitHub Actions for CI/CD and Terraform for infrastructure management), even early-stage teams can automate deployment and rollback without needing a full-time DevOps hire.
MVP isn’t enough
Reaching MVP is a huge milestone. But too many start-ups hit scaling pains because they built for launch, and not longevity.
If your current architecture can’t support a spike in users or a pivot in strategy, it becomes a liability.
That’s where MORE architecture comes in: Modularity, Observability, Resilience and Elasticity. These are the battle-tested foundations of modern, adaptable digital architectures.
When assessing your setup, ask:
- Modularity: Can components be developed, deployed and maintained independently? (e.g. modular monoliths, microservices)
- Observability: Do you have visibility into performance, costs, and failures before users do?
- Resilience: How well does your system tolerate failure and degrade gracefully?
- Elasticity: Can your platform automatically scale horizontally when demand increases?
MORE gives early-stage teams a clear set of priorities: build only what you need, know how it’s performing, and make sure it can recover and grow as your product evolves.
And with a modular, observable, resilient, and elastic stack, your team can iterate faster, limit rework, and stay focused on building features, and building value.
Take Nium (formerly InstaReM). Their early investment in cloud-native infrastructure gave them the flexibility to expand quickly into new geographies and product areas. A big factor in their evolution into a global payments platform now worth over USD $2 billion.
Poor infra has a direct cost
Every unnecessary outage, bottleneck, or overprovisioned instance affects your bottom line.
In Singapore, where engineering salaries are high, your infrastructure directly impacts your burn rate.
If your team spends time working around fragile infrastructure issues, you’re spending more than you need to.
From what I’ve seen, poorly designed infrastructure shows up as:
- Overpaying for overprovisioned cloud resources
- Engineering hours lost to fixing outages
- Hiring DevOps talent too early just to maintain basic stability
Some of the leanest teams I’ve worked with keep things under control by using:
- Serverless to eliminate idle cost
- Managed services to avoid ops burden
- Auto-scaling to match demand without overcommitting
A good local example is ShopBack. They use dynamic, cloud-native architecture that can handle seasonal traffic spikes automatically, without overbuilding or overspending.
More engineers ≠ more velocity
It’s tempting to hire more developers to speed things up.
But hiring more developers won’t fix underlying infrastructure issues. In fact, it often makes things more complex.
The start-ups I’ve seen grow fastest tend to fix their foundations early. That way, a smaller team can focus on delivering value. Not navigating platform issues.
Infrastructure isn’t just something for later. It’s part of your product. And increasingly, investors evaluate it just as closely as your features or growth rate.
Free infrastructure review for Singapore start-ups
At Just After Midnight, we’ve supported Singapore start-ups at every stage – from early-stage platforms like PowerTrade to Singapore-grown tech giants like Grab. We’ve modernised existing apps and built new cloud architecture solutions for greenfield ventures.
Right now, we’re offering a free infrastructure review for Singapore-based start-ups who want to:
- Extend runway
- Reduce complexity and cost
- Launch features faster
- Build scalable, investor-ready systems
This review is designed to help you identify gaps, risks, and blind spots.
Schedule your review using the form below, or reach me directly at [email protected] if you have any questions.
