> If I had spent an afternoon thinking through what I actually needed, I would have ended up exactly where I am now.

That's not how life works. Real life experience is immeasurably more valuable than imagining what it would be like to do something.

> Don’t let the ease of building trick you into skipping the strategy. It’s more expensive than it looks.

You shouldn't be skipping the strategy, but being able to experiment faster is really valuable. To quote from The Lean Startup, your big goal is often to obtain "validated learning", and projects like this, even (and especially) if you then throw them away, are fabulous for this, and can offer significantly more value than taking on a strategy consultant.

Or, why I threw away 20,000+ lines of working code and started over with nothing.