[skrebbel]

Of course nothing is black and white, but if you have limited time/money then you want to get to ramen profitability fast and you simply don’t have time for business model canvases, the perfect employee option scheme, a scalable k8s setup or a perfect CI/CD pipeline.

There’s so much stuff that feels important and valuable, but so little of it really cannot wait until after your wheels are off the ground.

When you read postmortems of startups that didn't get enough customers, often it’s this stuff that actually went wrong. Too much time spent on other stuff than “build something” and “that people want”.

To my experience, it’s difficult to resist all that good advice that’s all over the internet, books, accelerator programs and the like, and saving it all for later. People will tell you “you should get $PETPEEVE right from the start” for every imaginable pet peeve (all the way from legal stuff to unit tests to SEO) and they’ll be very convincing. Trying to resist this is not reductionist, it’s super hard.

[daanlo]

It is survivorship bias. Because the companies get to a point where unimportant things are important and you spend years in that second phase, the learnings are upside down. „If only we would have solved technical problem X from day 1 we would have so much less hassle in the years to come.“ Except that solving problem X on day 1 instead of shipping what the company did might have killed the company. I see this in a lot of second time founders, where startup 1 was successful - „this time I‘ll really avoid my mistake X.“