I'm starting my first project, any and all advice needed 😁

For most of your questions the answer it depends :( but here is a try: 1. MongoDB or MySQL but it really depends on your project and what you need. Also it depends on your preference as a developer. Or if you are hiring a developer they may have a preference. 2. Stripe is what most use these days. Your use case might need Paypal but for most web products, Stripe works out great. 3. React with Node is really popular right now. 4. You mean for hosting? You can try AWS free tier, Google and Azure may have something similar too. 5. Find the people you talk to here in PH Discussions on Twitter, and see who they follow. 6. One step at a time and don't give up. Good luck

A lot of your questions seem to require a little more context: 1. It really depends on what you mean by "scale" I/O, data, access? I use MongoDB Atlas, it's online, easy to manage. MongoDB, SQL, Snowflake all work, it just depends on your application and skill level. 2. I would recommend Stripe, but honestly, PayPal can process transactions just as well. 3. I took an angular course on Udemy, and just went with that. (Angular & NodeJS - The MEAN Stack Guide [2020 Edition]), though React does seem to be more popular nowadays. 4. Go to YC's Startup school, participate, and get deals. I got some pretty sweet deals as part of it that drastically reduced my overhead.(https://www.startupschool.org/da...) 5. I agree with @husseinyahfoufi, look at people on PH. Also, reddit communities for the product you plan to sell. 6. You will never be satisfied with what you created, just give up on that idea. Perfect is the enemy of good. Keep that in mind.

I have so many questions, mostly because it sounds like you might be falling into the same trap so many of us do our first time. My main question is have you validated this in the market yet? Because you should definitely do that before building anything. The other thing I would suggest is don't worry about scale. If this is your first time and you don't already have thousands of customers signed up, it is very likely you won't have to worry about scale for a while. Essentially if you have validated the market and have a couple early stage users that you can work with while you build, then just build, with regular feedback form your users. You'll be lucky if you have 10 users at one time in the beginning, so don't worry about scale until it's an actual problem. If however, you already have tens of thousands of users lined up and they will all be on your site at once then you can worry about scale. Until then it's just something to keep you stressed for no reason. Now for the remaining questions. 1. Stripe is great for payments, but I wouldn't worry about that until you have something that you know people are willing to pay for. 2. Node is great for front and back end dev. For front end React is great for a website, but terrible for single page apps. Angular is better at single page apps and terrible for websites 3. Look into Heroku. It's a much simpler devops solution than AWS and others. They also have a free tier and you'll be able to easily deploy various databases and whatnot. Most importantly you won't ever accidently rack up a $10,000 bill from Heroku. For analytics I like Segment and Heap most. You can feel free to follow me. I have been posting more about my latest startup journey and I'll be documenting the process so first timers like yourself don't necessarily have to learn all the hard lessons the hard way. I'll be releasing a new blog post later this week about how to approach finding customers before building anything. My handle is @brandonkindred.