I've seen products marginally succeed with major conceptual and technical debt. But in the long-term, it's always bad news. It's more difficult to compete bec

I've seen products marginally succeed with major conceptual and technical debt. But in the long-term, it's always bad news. It's more difficult to compete because you can't easily move forward without breaking a bunch of already existing features and it ends up costing the company lots of money because of the extra time needed to complete anything. I think the worst case I never saw was an app that was built by overseas developers. The boss, who knew nothing about technology or software, just wanted something cheap and fast. When I came on board as a consultant, we had two parallel apps (the new one and the old one) and any new feature took 10X as long. Customers slowly left to competing apps that could move much faster and the boss ended up letting all of the US-based developers go. She told me in my exit interview that she could hire 3 people in India for what she was paying me. I suppose it was the best thing that happened to me because it pushed me to work on my startup full-time.