[aerosmile]

It's so hard to put your finger on why exactly this strategy is so important. To illustrate this, consider these two options:

1. Your business needs to accomplish X. X is a manual task right now. It could take you 80% of your available time, but you would learn the ins and outs of your business.

2. The alternative is to hire someone to do X. Perhaps you could even find someone who is a specialist at X and much better at it than you are. Or you could perhaps focus on postponing X until you've written enough code that you can automate it.

Prior to PG's essay, the logical thing would have been to recommend the second approach. But today, most HN readers would agree - myself included - that the first approach is the right one. The best explanation I can offer is that building a startup is invariably a learning process, and doing X yourself forces the founder(s) to go through that process early on when the course corrections are cheaper.

[bg24]

I find it hard to believe how leaders still opt for #2. Their rationale is time-to-market. #2 is still fine if you "eat your own dog food". Doing it teaches a lot about how users would use the product.