[ttr2021]

To me this sort of seems like an optimisation problem. As a business you're after some monetary metric, and cash flow and ideally enough to pay your staff (haha, been there working for free or very little).

But you don't know up front what is required for YOUR business to achieve that metric and what you need to optimise for. That doesn't mean that you won't optimise for something later on, but you can take a page out of of Donald Knuths book here and say premature optimisation is not just the root of evil, but possibly spending time and resources on something that that you don't know is really directly achieving that business metric (at least at the current stage of the business) and in this context it's wasteful (and given resource scarcity in a startup, could lead to failure).

That's not to say they won't optimise or do these things later, it's just to reach this point in the business they did not do these things. They could and may have to later on.