When Europeans built cathedrals, the projects took generations to complete. The people who designed the work died before they saw results. The technology changed during the project. The audience who would have benefitted from the investment, the generations of people who might have found God in the cathedral, had died before it was ready.

Conversely, the bazaars of the Middle East moved rapidly, developed products as soon as the need was conceived, and left room for subsequent revision. They moved while the moment was right and the market was ready.

The lesson is that you should build your website early and get it out as soon as practical, and then revise it later and often, rather than spend whole business cycles preparing a perfect website for an audience will have gone elsewhere in the meantime.

Wiki link, Eric Raymond essay