I have more experience at startups than as a consultant. I was the 6th hire at a company that grew to 130 over three years and I was never thinking more than a few months in advance. A lot changes in five years — your customers, the competitive landscape. It's an enormously long period of time in technology. It seems like such a waste of time when you have customers that have real, unsolved problems today

Unless it's some one off batch process or a prototype, if the codebase doesn't last at least six months then it's unlikely to be something that makes any money.

In my experience, badly designed code tends to become a net loss after a couple of months because after that time someone is going to have to modify or fix it.