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by jimmychangas 2617 days ago
Better yet, the things you listed are qualities. They encompass every feature in the product. I think parent is generalizing too much on his assumption that only mature companies should spend time in optimization. Early stage startups can sometimes make mistakes, and optimizing early on can help them save the precious resources needed for them to survive another six months.
1 comments

>They encompass every feature in the product

That's not a given. It's plenty common to have the most often used features (say, sub-pages, or key processes) optimized the best, with the rarely used ones lingering at low optimization. User behavior is non-linear; small changes around pivotal values can yield great results. Over-optimizing on the other hand yields diminishing returns. Making even just your home page snappy can greatly improve conversions (or whatever is your success metric).

Other than that you are right that a bit of optimization here or there can save a lot of costs. I distinctly remember certain popular phpBB forum that, while quickly growing the userbase, somehow managed to still improve performance on rather measly hardware - and without much horizontal scaling! - getting in return genuine praise from the users, and also keeping the cost & complexity in check.

You are right, thank you for your reply. The "user behavior is non-linear" and "optimization yealds diminishing returns" are powerful insights.