​Outgrowing your duct-taped MVP is honestly a nightmare

hit a wall this week and just need to vent or see how others handled this phase

I run a niche B2B equipment leasing thing. doing okay revenue wise, but our entire backend is basically held together by Airtable, Zapier and an insane amount of google sheets. it was fine when it was just me and one contractor but now we have a team of 5 and things are breaking daily. automations misfire, data gets overwritten. its a literal mess

Everyone on twitter says “just get a technical cofounder!” yeah right. spent the last four months interviewing local devs. They either want a $160k base salary plus half my company to build a basic client portal, or they completely ghost after the second zoom meeting. the ego in the tech hiring market right now is exhausting tbh…

so now im looking into outsourcing the build or doing the fractional dev thing. A guy I know uses tech quarter for their system architecture and said getting an external team is way less of a headache than hiring full-time right now, But man.. handing over the keys to a third party is terrifying when your whole cashflow depends on this broken system staying alive.

I just cant figure out the timing. part of me wants to keep patching these stupid spreadsheets until we double our revenue, but i know deep down the whole house of cards is gonna collapse if i dont get real software built soon. it just feels like a massive financial gamble either way. getting stuck in this weird middle ground between “startup” and “actual established business” is draining.