Ask HN: Solving content discoverability for entertainment startup?

Big players like YouTube, Netflix, TikTok invest heavily into their recommendation systems to improve content discoverability. From the outside, it looks like this is a core feature of their product - a decisive factor between having product-market fit, and not having it.

I'm currently advising a small-ish startup building an entertainment product with tons of content (and ~10K monthly active users), and we're trying to understand how crucial this is for us at our stage.

Does anyone here have experience with setting up recommender systems or other tools? At what stage of your company did that become relevant? Did you wish you would have done it sooner/later? Is this even something we should worry about? Anything else I should now?

Thanks!