Avoid Premature Optimizations

Warning

Over a year old. May be outdated

Premature optimization is tuning a system's performance or resource use too early, before you fully understand what it needs to do and how it's designed.
Most engineers consider it bad practice.
Donald Knuth made the term famous. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."
Write code that works first. Optimize once it runs and you know where the bottlenecks are.
That way the effort goes where it actually pays off.

Do Things that Don't Scale

Early on, founders have to do things that don't scale to get traction, understand their users, and give them personal service.
Stripe and Airbnb did it by hand. They recruited users one by one and cared about growing small.
That's how they learned what users wanted, made the product better, and earned trust.
None of it scales, but it builds a core group of happy users, and that pays off in the long run.
As the company grows, what it learned in those early days becomes part of its culture and how it treats customers.
So founders should go ahead and do unscalable things early, so they can grow fast later.

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