Let’s be real, if you're still chasing product-market fit (PMF) and your CTO is already talking about technical debt, that's a red flag.

I’ve seen this play out over and over, 40+ MVPs built, 15 struggling startups brought back from the edge. And the same pattern keeps repeating:

• The founder wants to ship.
• The team wants to “do it right.”
• Weeks go by. No user feedback. No traction.
• Burn rate climbs. Pressure builds.
• And then… “technical debt” becomes the excuse for everything that’s not working.

But technical debt isn’t always the real problem.

The real problem is opportunity cost.

Every hour spent refactoring something no one’s even used yet is an hour not spent testing your idea in the real world.

Every dollar spent on “best practices” before your first paying user is a dollar you’re not spending on growth, or experiments, or literally anything else that might move you forward.

I’m not anti-quality. I'm just trying to redefine the difinition of "good code"

Here's the differene:

Technical debt is what happens when you make tradeoffs to move fast. That’s fine—if you’re learning and shipping, that’s the whole point.

Opportunity cost is what happens when you overthink, over-architect, and end up launching nothing.

And for early-stage startups, opportunity cost is way more dangerous.

Truth is, most successful startups started with “bad code.”

• Facebook’s early PHP codebase was famously messy.

• Airbnb’s infrastructure could barely handle bookings when they were scaling.

• Shopify dealt with “scary” code well into hypergrowth.

But they all had one thing in common: they shipped fast, learned fast, and found PMF before worrying about technical debt.

So what’s “good code” anyway?

It highly depends on the stage you’re in:

Trying to apply post-PMF engineering practices in the pre-PMF phase is like putting a turbo engine in a car without wheels. You’re optimizing the wrong thing.

What early-stage teams actually need?

• Fewer abstractions, more traction.
• Fast feedback loops
• Engineers who ask, “How quickly can we test this?” not “Is this the cleanest way to do it?”

And as a founder, your job is to protect that mindset. If your tech lead is slowing things down in the name of elegance before the product has real usage, you're not building a company, you’re funding a portfolio project.

So before you let someone convince you that the backend needs a total refactor—ask yourself: Do we even know if users want this yet?

Because the only thing worse than technical debt is not living long enough for it to matter.