Relevant Paul Graham quote:

    > Some startups could be entirely manual at first.  
    > If you can find someone with a problem that  
    > needs solving and you can solve it manually, go  
    > ahead and do that for as long as you can, and  
    > then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It  
    > would be a little frightening to be solving  
    > users’ problems in a way that wasn’t yet  
    > automatic, but less frightening than the far  
    > more common case of having something automatic  
    > that doesn’t yet solve anyone’s problems.

Generalizing that slighly, here’s what I call the Shirk & Turk Principle: When writing any new app or website or feature, implement as little of it as you can get away with and manually fake the rest behind the scenes.