“Catching something early on could be 1x of your cost and then 10x if you're fixing it by clean up downstream — because now you've got new data coming in that you'd have to continually add new iterative processes to fix — and then lastly at the last mile maybe 100x more cost if you have bad reporting that are actually telling the wrong things.”

Fix Data Architecture Early: Upstream 1x Cost, Downstream 100x Cost

Bad data compounds like debt. Taylor Wells worked on Disney+ from the ground up and saw this pattern at enterprise scale: a misnamed event or wrong tracking structure that costs an hour to fix at launch costs ten hours mid-product and a hundred hours — plus wrong business decisions — at the reporting layer. The principle applies to solo indie developers: spend half a day thinking through your event taxonomy before you ship.