Ooh, I like this. Too many people start projects at the logical beginning. But what you really want early on in a project is to maximize speed of exploration of the interesting parts.
To me there's a clear analogy with startups. The naive conception of starting a company is that you get a pile of money so you can hire a bunch of people and create important infrastructure. But with startups, you're trying something new, so the most efficient use of time is to find the riskiest hypotheses and test them as directly as possible. That often involves doing things that seem wrong if you proceed in the "logical" way. E.g., I knew a successful UGC company that didn't implement accounts and logins until like 6 months in. But that was fine, because actual accounts were not needed to figure out whether the business worked.
To me there's a clear analogy with startups. The naive conception of starting a company is that you get a pile of money so you can hire a bunch of people and create important infrastructure. But with startups, you're trying something new, so the most efficient use of time is to find the riskiest hypotheses and test them as directly as possible. That often involves doing things that seem wrong if you proceed in the "logical" way. E.g., I knew a successful UGC company that didn't implement accounts and logins until like 6 months in. But that was fine, because actual accounts were not needed to figure out whether the business worked.