Elias Feijó· Structural Risk

Self-Assessment

Backend Risk Self-Assessment for Seed & Series A Startups

A 5-minute diagnostic to evaluate whether your backend is structurally ready for growth, fundraising, or traffic spikes.

Designed for founders and early engineering teams under scaling pressure.

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How to use this assessment

Answer each question with Yes or No.

Be honest.

If you hesitate, count it as No.

0 of 24 answered0%
A

Scalability Exposure

Do you know your current system's maximum sustainable throughput?

Have you load-tested beyond your highest production peak?

Is horizontal scaling automatic?

If traffic doubled tomorrow, do you know what would fail first?

Are background jobs protected against runaway queue growth?

B

Failure & Recovery Readiness

Do you track Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)?

Is incident response documented?

Can you restore from backup within 60 minutes?

Are database migrations reversible?

Have you tested a full environment rebuild recently?

C

Observability & Blind Spots

Are critical business flows instrumented end-to-end?

Do you alert on business metrics (not only CPU/memory)?

Can you detect partial degradation automatically?

Are logs structured and queryable?

Do you have clear SLOs?

D

Cost & Architectural Risk

Do you know your most expensive AWS service per request?

Are there no single points of failure?

Are core services stateless?

Do you understand your cost scaling curve?

Can you estimate cost impact of 3x growth?

E

Founder Confidence Layer

Would you confidently walk through your architecture with a technical investor?

Do you know your top 3 structural risks?

Does your team agree on your biggest scaling constraint?

Would a major incident not materially disrupt fundraising or sales?

Your result

Scoring

Complete all 24 questions to see your score. (24 remaining)

Count your "No" answers:

0–5

Structurally stable for current scale

6–10

Growth fragility emerging

11–15

High structural risk under scale

16+

Significant exposure — audit strongly recommended

Most early-stage teams score between 8 and 14 "No" answers.

What This Assessment Doesn't Tell You

This checklist highlights risk categories. It does not:

  • Prioritize them by business impact
  • Estimate the cost of inaction
  • Model specific failure scenarios
  • Suggest a 30–90 day remediation roadmap

That's what a structured production risk audit provides.

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