Initial online startups have a few vital concepts in order for its success:
- The founders themselves want success.
- Startups are businesses and are subject to many business principles such as competition.
- Most online startup ideas can easily be replicated by code, especially new startups with minimal complexity built-in initially (e.g. enterprise needs like integrations).
- Long-running businesses cost less than businesses looking to catch up
In the case of a startup, they need to be able to prove the idea is worthwhile. That may come in many forms such as writing contracts, but most successful startups start with an MVP. Underlying this means speed. Typically, this means choosing the language that you're most comfortable programming in; if that's not an interpreted language like Python or Typescript, then it's likely slowing you down.
Even at large scale, the tooling for your future employees is important. If you choose a language nobody uses on a daily basis already, then it will be harder to employ. Additionally, the savings from more performant languages is far lower than that of employee salaries.
Which interpreted language should your new startup use?
What underpins a successful startups are its people, not just the founders. When hiring software engineers for your startup, they will usually come from other startups.
NodeJS has become a fast growing choice for new startups. This means, when poaching engineers, you'll want to find the best in the ecosystem out there now.
However, if you're more comfortable with another interpreted language such as Python, choose that to get to an MVP as soon as possible and make some money, or else the business will die.
Mobile development
See a separate curated opinion article.
Bottom line, regardless if your app is free using ads or freemium, if you want revenue i.e. paying users (for your subscriptions or for someone to click through an ad), focus on iOS.
You can choose React Native with JavaScript or Swift native development (whichever you're most comfortable with). React Native development sells developers to a story of cross-platform development saving time, but it's been shown it doesn't in the long run (design wise and technically wise, they are different and many libraries require customizing for each platform).
In the short term for MVP, choose whichever language you're most comfortable with. If you have no clue on either, then choose the native platform's language.
When to use native languages
Interpreted languages underlies a basis for startups which is to move fast, though there are times when native languages are required.
This is seen in Web3 and consumer startups that require a good user experience. If the startups require performance so that users have a decent experience to understand the underlying pain point that your startup solves to prevent churn, then use a native language.
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