> SEO can provide growth, but only after you've used everything else in your arsenal to get the platform to the point that you are ready to start optimizing.
Oh, how many times have I seen this mistake! SEO is one of your marketing tools, but (done right) it is not a premature optimization.
Spot on. Definitely not any more of a premature optimization than usability, since SEO is usability for bots.
So unless you really do not care about the crawlability and understandability of your site/app, you should be optimizing for bots in parallel with human usability.
Oh, how many times have I seen this mistake! SEO is one of your marketing tools, but (done right) it is not a premature optimization.