Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

As an engineering leader what I look for when picking tooling for SaaS which essentially boils down to two things:

  1) How expensive and difficult will it be to scale the Org.
  2) How difficult will it be to implement product features.

But at the end of the day, you spend time and money reinventing solutions already solved in other frameworks which distract from the features of your product. Elixirs libraries are growing, but they have not reached parity to near drop-in solutions found in Django for instance.

Is Django the fastest in code execution? No. Is it the most elegant? No.

But there is an outstanding catalog of existing solutions and libraries out there that a junior engineer can pull from.

Developer velocity is so much faster with a well established framework. Easy to hire for. And you spend time implementing product features instead of reinventing engineering solutions. My ideal product development workflow is to implement in Django, find the bottlenecks (if any) and then specialize those flows.

Elixir is great and beautiful, but it was much more difficult to find engineers with experience in it. I really only found engineers that had a curiosity to use it or just started using it. I was never able to find an engineer that I could hire who built and scaled a Unicorn level app with it. Something quite common to find with Django.

I'm not saying to use Django. But when starting a project, I just ask that people look at how hard it will be to find someone to help you in the future and decide if you want to spend time building product value or spend time writing beautiful code.

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I don't speak for anyone except myself and a few acquaintances but I wouldn't accept an offer to work on a startup with Elixir unless we're talking at least $15,000 a month or more. And even then it depends a lot on team and company culture. I am tired of sprinting without that ever being connected to me getting extra cash or even recognition.

Elixir and Phoenix are productive as hell but they also need deliberate approach and not everything should be done quickly. Requiring me to churn out 3-5 features a week in the first 6 months is the best way for me to hand my resignation a mere two weeks after starting.

Sorry, you might not have had this in mind, I am just reacting to your text.

But rest assured, ElixirForum has quite a few people who would grab an Elixir job if given the opportunity, some for as low as $2500 a month even. And most people frequenting the forum mostly check its own Jobs section. So if you really want to widen your options, definitely make a job ad post there.

Another good thing about Elixir is that the odds of you actually needing 100 devs coding in it are close to zero. I've been in financial EU startups that moved tens of millions a month (they were not huge) with the grand total of 4 devs. The only problem was clearing up customer requirements (i.e. our product people dropped the ball and left us doing most of their work).

And expensive? Yeah but I wouldn't be against that if I was an informed business owner. Most Elixir devs are refugees from other tech stacks and are quite senior. Good talent should be compensated well.

Are we talking about parenthesis here again?

It's easy to understand a well written Lisp codebase once you are familiar with its concepts. What you can't do is try to read it when all your prior programing exposure is from, say, the Algol language tree.