My company started as a couple of open source NuGet packages and a handful of customers, and the code matched: sell a license, generate a key, done. I tried applying full DDD to that codebase early, bounded contexts, aggregates, a ubiquitous language glossary, and it was a waste of time. There wasn't enough complexity yet to justify any of it.

Then the business grew into multi-jurisdictional licensing, VAT handling, merchant-of-record contracts, and vendor compliance reviews, and the same CRUD code that worked fine at ten customers started producing real bugs: misapplied discounts, wrong tax handling, contract terms nobody could explain the same way twice. That's the inflection point, when the rules multiply faster than the code can track them, and sales, legal, and support all describe the same concept differently.

In this session, we'll walk through what actually changed in the code and the process as my company crossed that line: building a shared vocabulary with non-engineers, carving out the first real bounded context, and letting the model get messier before it got better. Finally, we'll talk about how to tell, in your own startup, whether you're at that inflection point yet, or about to waste a few weeks on ceremony you don't need.