[twelve45]

I think Yishan Wong's thoughts on this really hits the mark: http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-tools-a...

It is incredibly important to get your tools right so you can operate as efficiently as possible. At my company we didn't get around to this till much later, partly due to the dilemma you mentioned abt focusing on customer-facing software vs. internal tools, and partly due to the fact that the people who would benefit the most from automation (e.g. finance folks, inventory managers, etc) don't have the same obsession with automating away mundane tasks like us engineers do.

This lack of tools hurt us quite a bit once we started scaling, in ways that impacted some customer relationships (because occasionally we didn't invoice or ship correctly, etc). We have since invested significantly in tools, but we should've done this to begin with.

To make the customer vs. internal tools compromise easier, you may even want to get some basic tools in place via contract work/offshoring and then revisit these later once you have the time/resources. The hard part really is determining what to automate, and how much, and those are decisions that you should make. The development itself can be done by someone else.