Sometimes – maybe most of the time – the really janky solution is the best one.
An example. If you’ve spent any time in an NHS hospital lately, you may have noticed the proliferation of carts with a screen, keyboard, mouse, a PC, and a battery that they scoot around the wards to access whatever system they want to access.
This solution is janky. It’s cheap. It’s the lowest common denominator, and it works. It’s commodity stuff, thrown together, and it just works.
Go back before the NHS had worked out how to roll of digital first systems for patient care at scale, everyone wants to give staff tablets and specialised mobile devices to do this. The interfaces were crap. It was all proprietary, specialised stuff so it cost more than just running the hospital. Horrible, awful, technology-led solutions that everyone hated and no one could make work.
In your startup, as a non-technology person you probably have a bit of an advantage here because died-in-the-wool technologists strongly prefer arcane and clever. This is your chance to inject some janky pragmatism.