It is infinitely better to have a product, customers, and technical debt, than to have no product or no customers and no technical debt.
Personally, I focus on avoiding technical debt when the cost of the debt will outweigh the costs of cleanup even within three or four months. So I try to keep to some best practices - having tests, having a good build system, running a linter, because I find those systems help me reduce bugs. And every time I have to fix a bug for a customer in production, it is a major time sink. Every time I have to manually test a new release, or fix problems after the fact, or block my teammates because I checked in bad code, then I am wasting time. So I try to do enough clean up to make sure I avoid breaking things all the time.
Comments
It is infinitely better to have a product, customers, and technical debt, than to have no product or no customers and no technical debt.
Personally, I focus on avoiding technical debt when the cost of the debt will outweigh the costs of cleanup even within three or four months. So I try to keep to some best practices - having tests, having a good build system, running a linter, because I find those systems help me reduce bugs. And every time I have to fix a bug for a customer in production, it is a major time sink. Every time I have to manually test a new release, or fix problems after the fact, or block my teammates because I checked in bad code, then I am wasting time. So I try to do enough clean up to make sure I avoid breaking things all the time.