[duped]

I worked at a startup that rewrote major parts of their product three times before the first Series A check cleared (while I worked there at least, I think they had another rewrite before my time). The company is alive and well because they didn't waste time and money on pondering architecture to solve a very difficult class of problems when they didn't know which problems were worth money yet.

They did do some smart things working around such known-unknowns, like operate as a consultancy for several years while building out the tech stack that would ultimately become the product catalog. That way they didn't have enormous risk associated with rewrites since all users were internal and zero projects actually needed feature or ABI with the stack.

The problems they had when I left were obvious, but the data model wasn't one of them. I'll stand by what I said above (ignoring the typo) - you can't specify a data model for a problem you don't know. And no startup really knows what problems they are going to solve when they start.