The hard lesson I learned during the dotcom era and immediately after is that this cult like worship of version 1 ends up sinking many companies but since it's new nobody wants to hear, it doesn't get reported well.
Any asshole can ship version 1. Shipping version 2 takes some talent.
In particular, to your scenario, there's a reason why companies operate in 'stealth' mode. The moment they are on the public radar, now all of the time frames are based on customer interest and customer complaints. We have to keep some tempo of releases to build customer confidence. You can't launch the MVP and then immediately stop all work to address the tech debt you acquired. So we're not talking about 'after MVP' versus 'before MVP', we are talking 'this year' versus 'next year or the year after'. That's a long time to creak along with very bad initial architecture decisions.
The value of a coach in sports or other activities is that this is a person who is not bogged down by the minutiae of the performance. They can see when you're stuck and tell you to stop. Very, very few developers have the ability to self-coach. It's one of the purposes of the morning standup: the hope that you hear yourself saying you've been wrapped around the axle on something and need a change of perspective. But the "stuckness" I'm talking about here has to do with Sharpening Your Axe. You're in a bad way because your 'tools' are not 'sharp', but you've already panicked about deadlines so you keep muscling through instead of realizing that the fastest way to complete tasks is to make the tasks easier and then do the task. That's the sort of tech debt that gets devs angry and resentful of people who tell them 'no'.
Totally agree that version 2 is really painful, and more painful the more we cut corners on version 1.
But I've seen sooo many startups ship version 1 and sink without trace. I'd say the vast majority of startups don't ever need to worry about version 2 because version 1 isn't going to get any traction.
The thing about YAGNI isn't technical - it's commercial. Ship version 1 as cheaply and quickly as possible so you understand whether there's any point in continuing.
Any asshole can ship version 1. Shipping version 2 takes some talent.
In particular, to your scenario, there's a reason why companies operate in 'stealth' mode. The moment they are on the public radar, now all of the time frames are based on customer interest and customer complaints. We have to keep some tempo of releases to build customer confidence. You can't launch the MVP and then immediately stop all work to address the tech debt you acquired. So we're not talking about 'after MVP' versus 'before MVP', we are talking 'this year' versus 'next year or the year after'. That's a long time to creak along with very bad initial architecture decisions.
The value of a coach in sports or other activities is that this is a person who is not bogged down by the minutiae of the performance. They can see when you're stuck and tell you to stop. Very, very few developers have the ability to self-coach. It's one of the purposes of the morning standup: the hope that you hear yourself saying you've been wrapped around the axle on something and need a change of perspective. But the "stuckness" I'm talking about here has to do with Sharpening Your Axe. You're in a bad way because your 'tools' are not 'sharp', but you've already panicked about deadlines so you keep muscling through instead of realizing that the fastest way to complete tasks is to make the tasks easier and then do the task. That's the sort of tech debt that gets devs angry and resentful of people who tell them 'no'.