A startup principle, popularised by Y Combinator, that encourages founders and early teams to take on manual, unautomated, or unsustainable work in order to serve early customers well and learn quickly, before investing in systems that can handle growth. In testing and quality terms, this might mean manually verifying every new user's setup, personally responding to every bug report, or hand-testing every release rather than building automation. The point is not to avoid automation forever but to defer it until the patterns are clear enough to be worth automating.
For example: a two-person startup manually onboarding each new customer to spot friction points; or a founder personally testing every release on their own device rather than building a CI pipeline before there is a stable product to test.
For example: a two-person startup manually onboarding each new customer to spot friction points; or a founder personally testing every release on their own device rather than building a CI pipeline before there is a stable product to test.
