It seems like this is really the vector concept. Everything for the long term must be scalable (what your founders are getting right) versus everything for the short term (what you seem to be doing wrong) can be fungible. Perhaps the issue is in presentation? The real concern that your cofounders have is an enormous mass of manual work in the future. This is a real concern. But it's also to say, "We'll drop this backbreaking level of service once we get X users, at which point they'll be coming to us."