“What some founders do is get in a big hurry to get it to market. We made sure that what we built would scale and that we could change things out as we moved along.”

Design your codebase so individual vendors can be swapped without rebuilding

After painfully migrating from a failing transcription vendor to AssemblyAI (cutting costs in half and gaining features), Vince codified a rule: architect each integration as an isolated module. If you design the seams correctly from the start, replacing a vendor is a week's work instead of a quarter's crisis. It's the vendor equivalent of loose coupling.