<i>Make sure you've built a functional admin panel before you launch.</i><p>Sorry, but this is bad advice. For 99% of startups, their biggest risk is not going to be spending too much time mucking around in the production database because they don't have an admin panel, but that no one is going to show up or care when they launch their product. Building cool stuff like admin panels, metrics dashboards, and loggers is just more procrastination to keep from doing the most difficult thing: launching.<p>If you're going to build those things at some point, make it <i>after</i> you've seen that users care enough about this product that you're not going to scrap it and move on to the next one. Otherwise you're just wasting effort.<p>EDIT: To be fair, I think this is otherwise a great post. It is important to build those things <i>early</i> but I think building them pre-launch and pre-validation is a big mistake.