> but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering
The answer should be obvious. You are selling the end product, not your tech stack. For an early stage company there is zero benefit to wasting time on pointless engineering purism. You should use as much SaaS and other pre-built software as you possibly can and spend 100% of your effort on your core offering.
> You are selling the end product, not your tech stack.
I think the mentality is that by having a better tech stack the product will be better and also more "future-proof". Personally, I always spend (waste) time upgrading all the libraries to the latest versions and maintain the code up to the current standards. Maybe it doesn't really improve the product, but it gives me confidence that I am always ready to implement whatever features or most recent improvements in technology I could take advantage of.
As someone who recently had to do some work on a project running node 0.12, you are not wasting your time. (I can’t even use destructuring assignments, because JS didn’t have them back then. -_-)
The answer should be obvious. You are selling the end product, not your tech stack. For an early stage company there is zero benefit to wasting time on pointless engineering purism. You should use as much SaaS and other pre-built software as you possibly can and spend 100% of your effort on your core offering.