Frugality is just a basic life skill. It serves you well in anything.
However, I'm beginning to notice now that our customer base has grown and our revenues have doubled a couple of times over since our time in YC that what used to seem extravagant (paying people to do things for us) is now becoming the smartest way to make problems go away. I just paid Google $500 yesterday to handle search on our site, because it is a problem that has effected me on a couple of occasions, and I decided that even one more day of me fighting with full text search in MySQL and PHP (which is not a comfortable language for me to work in, as I use Perl mostly) was one day too many--the opportunity cost was just too high, when that one day spent talking to customers could close a deal worth many times the $500/year that I pay for Google Custom Search.
But, that's frugality of another kind (one that considers the value of both time and money), of course, so it doesn't invalidate the idea that frugality is pretty much always a net win. I just thought it worth mentioning since I've seen plenty of entrepreneurs take frugality too far. Colocating their own box instead of renting a server in order to save $10/month, for example...if you have a single hardware problem during the 18-36 months that the server is in service you end up with a raw deal (because you either have to go to the colo and deal with it, or hire the colo service folks at $100/hour to deal with it). If it's not the focus of your business, try to find someone else who does have that as their focus to do it for you. Work on your differentiating factors, not the day-to-day crap that every business has to have.
That's a very good example of what frugality is. A lot of people seem to equate "frugal" and "cheap" which is wrong; fragality is only spending money when you need to. Or in your case, you determined that the cost of spending $500 for a Google custom search was worth less money than the time you yourself were putting into doing it yourself.
Supporting your comment, I've heard the phrase "many people spend a lot of time to save a little money and some people spend a lot of money to save a little time."
How many lawyers/doctors/executives do you know who do handyman work? It is just so much more cost effective to pay someone to fix this or change the oil so that the person can get another billable hour or another patient or another business deal or address client/customer needs? So I won't quite call it frugality, but more efficiency. The question becomes "are you efficient with your money and time?"
That's also a good point. I think there's a disconnect there in a lot of cases, several of them being former employers of mine.
I think the ones who stray from "frugal" to "cheap" are failing to consider the value of what they're spending their money on, and rather focussing on the number of dollars that are leaving their account.
However, I'm beginning to notice now that our customer base has grown and our revenues have doubled a couple of times over since our time in YC that what used to seem extravagant (paying people to do things for us) is now becoming the smartest way to make problems go away. I just paid Google $500 yesterday to handle search on our site, because it is a problem that has effected me on a couple of occasions, and I decided that even one more day of me fighting with full text search in MySQL and PHP (which is not a comfortable language for me to work in, as I use Perl mostly) was one day too many--the opportunity cost was just too high, when that one day spent talking to customers could close a deal worth many times the $500/year that I pay for Google Custom Search.
But, that's frugality of another kind (one that considers the value of both time and money), of course, so it doesn't invalidate the idea that frugality is pretty much always a net win. I just thought it worth mentioning since I've seen plenty of entrepreneurs take frugality too far. Colocating their own box instead of renting a server in order to save $10/month, for example...if you have a single hardware problem during the 18-36 months that the server is in service you end up with a raw deal (because you either have to go to the colo and deal with it, or hire the colo service folks at $100/hour to deal with it). If it's not the focus of your business, try to find someone else who does have that as their focus to do it for you. Work on your differentiating factors, not the day-to-day crap that every business has to have.