The money bags problem. As in, “What color should the bags be that we put all this money in?”.

I continually make this error, although I’ve gotten better. It’s the act of searching for and resolving issues too far in the future. Crucially, they require several positive events to occur before the problem is relevant.

It happens to every new entrepreneur that I have seen. It’s not ego assuming that things will go perfect. It’s a lack of understanding of the problems that can arise.

The classic example is:

Okay, we’re starting this company to help businesses sell on the Internet.

All the businesses in this arena are decrepit, so they don’t have an API. Instead, when new customers sign up, we manually create their accounts for them at Seamless Chex.

This obviously won’t scale. When we have a hundred users signing up in a day, there’s no possible way we can do that. Obviously.

Before we work on growth, let’s find a payment processor that has an API.”

That team flails in the water until they die.

Of course, the correct thing to do here is only handle the scale problem when it is the biggest problem right in front of your face. You can manually do things for a long time and still turn out pretty good.

Building a business is harder than you think, and in different ways than you think. When you reach out into the future to solve that issue ahead of time, you are time travelling to create new problems for yourself. You don’t need to do that.

For that semi-fictional example, the problem is that you aren’t earning enough money to survive. If you have a long-term vision, you won’t solve yourself into an unassailable local maxima by fixing that first.

Nearly all the problems that new entrepreneurs try to solve in the future are problems that happen at a certain level of scale. It’s easy to think that the advice “don’t optimize for scale early” is about not using Kubernetes for your launch. But it also applies to your business development, product, marketing, and personnel choices.

Solve the problems that you need to solve right now, immediately, to get to the next level. If the problem is only company killing at higher scale, wait till you’re at that scale. At that point, you’ll have more resources, more experience, and more latitude of options to handle it than you can right now.

In addition, you need to conserve your energy and resources and focus on the things that matter at the moment. You don’t need to create new problems for yourself; solve the ones that are in front of your face.

Do not worry about the color of your money bags. It will be a great problem to have. A thousand things may kill you first.