I met a small group of entrepreneurs a year or two back that had built a social networking site. I asked them, “how is the better/different than MySpace, which is already dominating?”

They said, “Our design is more scalable.”

I paused, and said, “You’re pretty far away from earning the right to have a scalability challenge.”

The problem was that they had worked on a down-the-road problem (scalability) taking energy from the immediate problem (getting users). It’s a common way to fail in startups (I’ve done it myself): spending too much time solving future problems, instead of solving the “now” problems.