Great choice for a startup, especially in its early stages.

Everything you need is either already there or available as a plugin. A lot can be done even by a single developer with average experience: APIs, BI and financial reports, workplaces for your staff, even some front-end pages when times are tough and you need it out quickly.

I consider the ORM to be the most powerful of its features. Since version 2, you can produce everything you’ll want with rather simple queries, without using any raw SQL. While simple queries won’t always be optimal, you have great control over optimization based on context of each case.

Of course when you move from startup scale to production scale, you’ll need to change your approach to design of database tables and APIs, both internal and external. At this stage you can usually afford some experienced developers to make things right and set up guidelines, linters and validators for your development team to use and create production-ready solutions for your growing appetites.

In my opinion, at this scale it’s also advised to decentralize and move some features into separate services, such as authentication API, BI, third-party integrations, etc.