If you're really a startup, looking for a product-market fit, then you don't know exactly what you're building yet. There's a high change you're going to throw away a lot of code.
e.g. you spend effort caring about scalability, flexibility, proper architecture, full test coverage — only to hand it to users who will say they won't buy it, it's not actually the feature they wanted. You can learn such lessons with crappy copy-pasted code, and then worry about code quality once you've figured out what to actually build.