So, you had customers. Which you eventually lost, but you had them. These guys don’t even have a first customer yet. For them, code quality can wait. For you, you just waited too long to address it.
Yes and no. That we waited 'too long' is only easy to see in hindsight. When growing a company quickly, you generally don't know where the system is going to get stressed until it is already stressed. Then whether or not it is too late has a lot less to do with time (things need to be fixed yesterday) and a lot more to do with the code (how long will it take to fix). You may get lucky and have your weak link be a portion of your system with few dependencies that's easily changed. Then again you might get boned and have the problem be some core system that has dependencies snaking through half your code base (which was the case in my aforementioned startup).
