Here's the thing: I know of at least one company that made it big starting with a steaming pile of technical garbage. They used their users as a QA department.

Here's the thing: I know of at least one company that made it big starting with a steaming pile of technical garbage. They used their users as a QA department. The business logic was all in stored procedures in the DB, which was always on fire as a result, and the front-end was bad PHP with so much indentation that it was 25% blank space after rendering the page! Yet their users loved them, the numbers went up and up, investors lined up to take the founders to dinner and vie for the chance to pound millions of dollars up their asses. It was crazy. They built a half-pipe in the office, you know, for skateboards. They became a household name and IPO'd a few years ago. The point is this all happened despite their garbage architecture and crappy code. Yet it would have all been much easier and cheaper to do it right the first time. (Word to the wise, the founder/CEO wound up crying at his desk as the investors wrested the company from him. "Be careful what you wish for: you might get it.")