As my beard starts to grey, I've come to the conclusion that needing to drop a lot of money to retrofit is an infinitely better problem than not having captured a large segment of the market.
As someone who did Perl commercially from 2001-2019, most of my career was spent working at companies who'd done a large Perl build-out some time between 1995 and 2005, made a lot of money and captured a large amount of market share, and were now expensively retrofitting a lot of very, very nasty code that inexperienced programmers had smashed together in a rush.
Much better to be in that position than a company with a beautiful codebase who didn't capture the market
For sure. But I wonder how many are prevented from capturing a larger segment of the market because of poor design decisions re more fundamental primitives of the product. I suppose the worst case scenario here is a complete rebuild and migration.
Seeing founders with less care for detail and more for the sheer growth of their user base was impressive and deflating.
It felt like everyone I compared myself to, they were devoting 90% of their time to selling and 10% to building.
I share the feeling. There's success stories of companies doing the same (e.g. Notion, Replit), so I know it's not completely off-book, but I constantly wonder whether there is downside to that approach of focusing on sales in the beginning. I can guess things like less likely to be innovative, but is that true? Maybe since they average being alive longer than the ones that focused on product in the beginning, any potential downsides are negated in the long term (e.g. just innovate later with the infinite runway they now have). Would love to see some study/survey on this.