My accounting background, combined with working for a startup previously means that I’m familiar with at least some of the advice given to tech founders.
Generally, the advice is to get your minimum viable product out the door as soon as possible. Make sure that people are actually willing to pay money for your service, and then you can start worrying about cleaning things up and worrying about how your product needs architected in order to be able to scale.
I can see the value to the suggestion. You don’t want to spend 10 years building something and then find out that you were solving a problem that nobody else feels like is a problem.
It’s far better to spend 6 months building a MVP, and then find out that your product isn’t going to be a go.
For certain personality types, it’s really hard to move forward on anything until it’s perfect. I don’t normally consider myself to be one of those people. I tend to think that perfect is the enemy of good enough, but I’m running across situations lately that give me a bit more sympathy for that mindset than I used to have.
It can be hard to know when you’re reinventing the wheel, vs. when you’re trying to gather enough foundational knowledge in an area to avoid tripping over something that is otherwise going to torpedo your entire idea.
It’s a tricky judgement call, made all the more tricky when it’s your first rodeo and you’re not 100% sure that you can build the application in the first place.