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jacquesmlast Thursday at 7:18 AM0 repliesview on HN

It's all about balance, in the end. If you do too much of one thing your business will fail. If you don't do enough of another, your business will fail too. And they're the same thing...

The trick then is to do just enough of everything to avoid disaster and to move as fast as you can to get to a realm where you can actually afford to do it right. Most start-ups initially cut corners like it is crunch time at the circle factory, which then usually catches up with them at some point either killing them or forcing them to adapt a different pace. Knowing exactly when to put more or less attention on some factor is the recipe for success but nobody has managed to execute that recipe twice in a row without finding things that no longer work, so it remains a dynamic affair rather than one you can ritualize.

And that's where checklists shine: repeated processes that are well defined and where change is slow enough that the checklists become 'mostly static', they still change but the bulk of the knowledge condensed in them stays valid over multiple applications.