[Summary] Do things that don't scale - by Paul Graham

Paul Graham has written a lot of essays. But one of my all-time favorites is this one.

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

This is the summary of that article

In the initial time of the startup, you have to push your startup to grow. You can't expect a startup to grow themselves

Recruit your users manually:

In the early times, go and find users manually and onboard them manually. Most products need this as you can't expect users to use the products without any push.

Two reasons why founders ignore manual recruiting

1. They are lazy or shy.
2. They think doing things manually is small as they can't grow big in the future.

Startups are fragile:

Most of the startups at the early stage are fragile. And so it gets rejected by journalists, investors.

But the big danger is when the founders think it's too fragile and their startup won't grow.

So founders should be asking a question like "How big this will grow if we are right" than asking "how my company will change the world"

It's better to solve your problem so you won't face any big challenges in recruiting people manually or else you have to find the interested group and do a simple launch

Make initial users happy:

In the early stage, don't focus only on acquiring users but take extra steps to make them happy and delight them.

When you are small you can make that extra step to make them happy which the big one can't do. That's the advantage.

Most founders ignore this because:

1. They think this won't scale
2. They have never experienced things like this.

Experience:

Delivering a product is one component but the experience you deliver is what differentiates you from your competitors big or small.

In the early stage, founders should focus on how good the experience they can deliver with their unfinished, buggy product.

Most founders will miss their early days gathering feedback from users when they have grown big in the future.

Focus on the niche first:

It's better to start in the narrow or niche market first and then grow broader.

Remember Facebook how they got their initial users on Harvard and then expanded to other colleges.

In other words, first, focus on the subset of the market and then add more subsets to the group.

Doing things manually:

As the title of the essay explains that founders have to do things like recruiting, onboarding users manually which will help them to get invaluable feedback from their users.

For example, pebble manually assembled hundreds of their watches before making millions.

One more advantage of doing things manually is you can pay extensive attention to the users that the big ones can't do

Consulting:

Founders are also encouraged to do consulting with their users to find their pain points and their routine.

Consulting is a classic example of things that don't scale. But this gives founders an opportunity to peep into the user's work and the pain problems they are facing.

Solving problems manually:

In the early stage, it's totally fine to do things manually to solve the problems of the users than automating them.

Some startups even start entirely manual. In means, everything is done manually by the founders behind the screen. But they got users who got real problems that to be solved which is good.

It's better to solve things manually for which users pay than automating things that users don't need

Do small launches:

In the early stage, for most startups, big launched won't work. Doing small and incremental launches will only work as they will get a small set of users and try to retain them

Most founders do big launches because:

1. They feel that the product is matured and when it's shown to people, they will join.
2. Doing small launches won't scale and doing a big launch will acquire more users in less time.

In the initial stage, retaining and delighting users are more important than acquiring more users.

Startups as a vector:

It's better to think of startups as a vector of what we are going to build and doing unscalable things to get the initial traction.

The important thing to remember is to recruit people manually and delight them with good experience.

I hope you enjoyed this summary :)