>I'm never starting another business where everything isn't self serve, automated and done at the beginning.

Isn't this the exact point which the article argues against? Perhaps the problem was really that you couldn't work out a good methodology to automate these tasks with your partner, a problem that would've occurred even if you'd tried to automate it at the beginning.

I think the real takeaway here is just the same "fail fast, fail early" we see everywhere, but taken to the next level. Get Real urges you to ship your product as early as possible, but this is saying that you don't even need the product to get started.