Relevant Paul Graham quote: > Some startups could be entirely manual at first. > If you can find someone with a problem that > needs solving an

Relevant Paul Graham quote: > Some startups could be entirely manual at first. > If you can find someone with a problem that > needs solving and you can solve it manually, go > ahead and do that for as long as you can, and > then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It > would be a little frightening to be solving > users’ problems in a way that wasn’t yet > automatic, but less frightening than the far > more common case of having something automatic > that doesn’t yet solve anyone’s problems. Generalizing that slighly, here’s what I call the Shirk & Turk Principle: When writing any new app or website or feature, implement as little of it as you can get away with and manually fake the rest behind the scenes.