Do Things That Don't Scale
Paul Graham · 2013
"Early startups should manually recruit users and do unscalable work; growth comes from effort, not automation."
Paul Graham's definitive advice for early-stage startups: you cannot wait for users to naturally discover your product. Founders must manually, and sometimes painstakingly, recruit their first users one by one and do things that are structurally unscalable.
A common startup fallacy is that if you build a great product, users will come. Graham argues that founders must manually 'push the snowball' to get momentum. This means flying to a user's house to install the software, manually acting as the 'backend' algorithm (the Wizard of Oz technique), or physically going door-to-door (like Airbnb founders taking photos of apartments). These unscalable actions not only get you your first users, but they force you to talk to them, ensuring you actually build what they want.
According to Paul Graham, what is the biggest mistake founders make regarding early customer acquisition?
Read more about the topic
The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Do Things That Don't Scale (original essay)paulgraham.com
- Paul Graham explains what it means to do things that don't scaleYouTube
- Paul Graham's counter-intuitive startup adviceInc.
Invisible Asymptotes
"Every growth curve has an invisible ceiling; great companies identify and route around theirs before hitting it."