Hi,
can you confirm the issue only appears when the first line of the
buffer isn't an outline heading? I think it's easy enough to fix then,
and if you like you might want to try the patch I've attached.

It's bugged me for a while that `org-back-to-heading' et al throw
errors when they're used before the first heading, but I haven't
really come up with a better solution.

On 8/18/15, Andreas Leha <andreas.leha@med.uni-goettingen.de> wrote:
> Hi Bastien,
>
> Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:
>> Hi Andreas,
>>
>> Andreas Leha <andreas.leha@med.uni-goettingen.de> writes:
>>
>>> For quite some time now, I have to disable outshine/outorg [1] as it
>>> does give me "Before first heading" (complete backtrace [2]) whenever I
>>> open an org file followed by more issues actually using org mode.
>>
>> Copying Thorsten as the author of outshine.el, hopefully he's be able
>> to dig deeper.
>
> Thanks, but my hopes are low.  Quoting from the top of outshine's github
> readme [1]:
>
> ,----
> | events in my life forced me away from Emacs and [...] I won't have the
> | time to fix issues or code new features (though I will apply patches)
> `----
>
> Regards,
> Andreas
>
> [1] https://github.com/tj64/outshine
>
>
>