If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.
As a side note, I've learned that the existence of a large number of viable ways to accomplish a task is a pretty big anti-signal for the desirability of accomplishing that task in the first place. When I started my career in 2000, there was a huge debate over whether the "right" way to develop a desktop application was MFC or .NET or Java or Visual Basic or Qt or WxWindows. The real answer was "don't develop desktop apps, because the web's about to take over". When the big web 2.0 businesses were founded from 2005-2011, there were basically two viable options for building a webapp: Rails or Django. Now that everyone's arguing about microservices vs. Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. serverless vs. Beanstalk vs. Heroku, it's likely that the real answer is "develop a blockchain app instead".
> If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.
That's... not true. The choice of web stack – and, in fact, the whole software – is just a piece of what a startup may need.
Seriously, look at the list of YC startups on 2018 and tell me if most couldn't use either something like Rails, or a Single Page App In React With A Serverless Backend. And it wouldn't matter one bit.
As a side note, I've learned that the existence of a large number of viable ways to accomplish a task is a pretty big anti-signal for the desirability of accomplishing that task in the first place. When I started my career in 2000, there was a huge debate over whether the "right" way to develop a desktop application was MFC or .NET or Java or Visual Basic or Qt or WxWindows. The real answer was "don't develop desktop apps, because the web's about to take over". When the big web 2.0 businesses were founded from 2005-2011, there were basically two viable options for building a webapp: Rails or Django. Now that everyone's arguing about microservices vs. Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. serverless vs. Beanstalk vs. Heroku, it's likely that the real answer is "develop a blockchain app instead".