The term "premature optimization" is a peeve of mind as it's effectively a meaningless, prejudicial term. If we're really farcically talking about 0 versus 1+

The term "premature optimization" is a peeve of mind as it's effectively a meaningless, prejudicial term. If we're really farcically talking about 0 versus 1+ user products, however, in actuality the user will do a quick test of your wrapped web app with the glacial web services and the slow responsiveness and they'll dismiss it out of hand. A competitor will come along with a spritely alternative that has a fraction of the features and will eat your lunch. This is the demonstrative history of our industry. Over and over again performance (and this is a relative thing -- a CRM with a 1.5s page render time is fine when everything was slow, but suddenly feels archaic and junky when a competitor is effectively instantaneous) has been the difference between winners and losers. But we still have these cheap conversations as if it's a feature that you just bake in later.