Very good article (as always from Derek). I'd just like to point out something he didn't mention in the article: Derek was coming at this mostly from a "User Ex

Very good article (as always from Derek). I'd just like to point out something he didn't mention in the article: Derek was coming at this mostly from a "User Experience" angle. But there's a very clear business angle to this as well. While most startups gloss over this fact, programming time costs money. Sure, if it's you doing the programming you're not actually paying yourself money, but that's a fiction - you're costing yourself a ton of money on opportunity costs. So when you're trying to make a decision on whether to automate or not, you should also take into consideration how much money it costs to automate, versus how much it costs to program. A good programmer costs thousands of dollars a month, so spending a month building an automated billing system (for example) isn't a good business decisions if the alternative is paying someone $100 a month for going over 30 customers and manually doing the billing. Not to mention the fact that a month spent building things that can be cheaply automate is a month farther from getting market validation for your product.