From personal experience, I would say he is entirely right. The first iteration of an app will be used by very few people, and most probably require a lot of c

From personal experience, I would say he is entirely right. The first iteration of an app will be used by very few people, and most probably require a lot of changes in scope as users tend to have a way of 'abusing' (in a good way) a system in ways you could never conceive. Optimising for something that won't be used can be a terrible waste of time. For example, I recall a niche site that dealt with antiques - People could list their antiques for sale in a nice searchable 'craigslist' style site. They also included a separate url that showed only the antiques for sale by a single user, it was more of an afterthought than a core feature. The 'abuse' came when users, especially antique shops, starting using these as their actual sites. In a time when getting a presence on the internet was an arduous deal (hire a developer, hosting, domain name etc.) It turned out that the real interest of the site wasn't searchable antiques, but rather as a very simple method of creating an antiques focused minisite. Unfortunatey I don't recall the url.