Do Things that Don't Scale

When running an early-stage startup, be prepared to do things that will not work in the long-run, but are critical to getting your product or service off the ground. /p

https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

• pick a single user and act as if they were consultants building something just for that one user

• The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually.

• There’s a more extreme variant where you don’t just use your software, but are your software. When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later.

• Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that’s one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones.

• I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn’t work: the Big Launch.

• Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them.

• It’s not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that.

• fabricating things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups

• Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it’s a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good.

• Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off.