Do things that don't scale

[Chris_Willow]

The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

This essay by Paul Graham was on top of hackernews yesterday and really hit home for me.

It's a long read so I'll share the best stuff here (emphasis by me).

On Stripe (the payment platform):

founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes, they say "Great, we'll send you a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.

Stripe delivered "instant" merchant accounts to its first users was that the founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant accounts behind the scenes.

Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks.

On targeting a narrow market first:

Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.

get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them.

Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users

It's always worth asking if there's a subset of the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly.

On getting first users manually:

When we approached merchants asking if they wanted to use our software to make online stores, some said no, but they'd let us make one for them. Since we would do anything to get users, we did.

In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings.

I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy.

What are your thoughts?

P.S.Here's the full article:
Do Things that Don't Scale

 

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