The Other Stuff That's Not Product That You Need To Build Early
blog.meatinthesky.com
blog.meatinthesky.com
Sorry, but this is bad advice. For 99% of startups, their biggest risk is not going to be spending too much time mucking around in the production database because they don't have an admin panel, but that no one is going to show up or care when they launch their product. Building cool stuff like admin panels, metrics dashboards, and loggers is just more procrastination to keep from doing the most difficult thing: launching.
If you're going to build those things at some point, make it after you've seen that users care enough about this product that you're not going to scrap it and move on to the next one. Otherwise you're just wasting effort.
EDIT: To be fair, I think this is otherwise a great post. It is important to build those things early but I think building them pre-launch and pre-validation is a big mistake.
Payment integration is a big pain and is something you should get into the product early, because grafting it on later will hurt. The same goes for ad management, if that is your business model.
This was more about the stuff they didn't ask about that they should have, but your point is exceptionally well taken - people who are picking a revenue model should support that revenue model before launch.
If that is the case, which gateway did you choose. From the gateways I spoke to this type of operation is difficult to get approved unless the final vendor itself has a merchant account. Was that the case in your startup?
The biggest problem that I could see with building a panel up front is that you might be building it for the wrong product. In my eyes, testing your product to see if you get any traction would probably win.
As it turned out, some of the most common customer support issues we had weren't anticipated by us in advance, so building out an admin panel would've still only met part of our needs.
Make sure you build a real metrics dashboard and implement a real logger before you launch.
Just launch it, then figure out how to instrument and admin it. Yeah, it will be painful, but at least you'll have some idea what you're trying to accomplish.
Sure, there are plenty of vetted CMS systems out there (e.g., Drupal, Wordpress, etc.), but they're massive overkill when you only need an events list or something.