
The Manual-First Startup - suneel0101
http://viniciusvacanti.com/2013/05/07/the-manual-first-startup/
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aaronbrethorst
Agree 100%. As an example, when I first created Cocoa Controls, I wrote a
little Ruby app that iterated over every single one of GitHub's Objective-C
repositories and stuffed them into a database, where I then manually checked
each one to see if it was worth including. Literally every repository. By
hand. It was a huge amount of effort, but it was also the only way to get the
amount of content that I needed to make the site useful enough to get
contributors to submit content.

Nowadays, the content volume is more than self-sustaining (I have 46 different
repositories in my queue, all submitted by readers), but I still check every
submission, clean them up by hand, and manually publish.

(<https://www.cocoacontrols.com>)

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unoti
At first I thought this was going to be like "write the manual first" a la
Fred Brooks. But it actually made a great point. Yesterday for the first time
I read pg's outstanding growth essay <http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html>
which confirms many of these same excellent ideas.

~~~
chaz
I thought it was that, too, and it reminded me of Amazon's approach to product
management, which is still pretty relevant to this post. Amazon's concept is
working backwards, and they start with a press release of the
product/initiative. It forces a clear articulation of what it is, how it's
different, and who it's for. Internal circulation is used to refine it.

More details: [http://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-
dev...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-development-
and-product-management/answer/Ian-McAllister)

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dools
Excellent advice and reminds me of the Human Intervention as a Competitive
Advantage article from Derek Sivers: <http://sivers.org/hi>

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marban
Related: <http://ryanhoover.me/post/43986871442/email-first-startups>

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rafaelc
tl;dr Do non-scalable things to reach product/market fit, then do scalable
things

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orangethirty
I'm curious. My understanding of anything-first startups is that you do
everything manually to test a market, grow your clientele, and turn a profit.
In your post, you mention not being profitable yet, even with the injection of
around 7.5 million dollars. As someone who is now used to building businesses
that turn a profit _before_ they launch, your situation is interesting. Note
that I'm not looking to start a flame war, just genuinely interested.

~~~
vacanti
That's a good question. If you can create a startup that's profitable day one,
that's great.

But, there are lots of businesses that need a fixed cost base that only turn
profitable after millions of users. But, they turn very profitable with tens
of millions of users.

If you restrict yourself to just ideas that are profitable day one, that's
great though you may miss out on some great ideas.

~~~
orangethirty
This is the way I see it:

If I have to scale to millions of users then my business plan is not as good
as I thought. Why? Because as much as I'd like to think otherwise, tech
startups do not produce a tangible product. Unlike automobile manufacturers,
or hardware folk, we don't need a lot of money to build something big. All we
need are people to write the code. Then we just focus on selling it. For me, a
software product that requires millions of users to be profitable, is simply
playing the lottery. I can play the lottery for $1 and not have to deal with
investors and TC.

Someone might say that I lack experience doing so. Well, not really. I've been
there, and done that. Online and offline. Nowdays, to me, its a matter of
trying to win the millions lottery, or building something that makes me money
without the drama of SV.

I know I'm wrong on various points. If you will, explain.

~~~
dpritchett
OP left a quarter-million a year hedge fund job to swing for the fences. I'd
guess his floor for "acceptable" exits is in the multiple millions. Your
personal mileage my vary.

[http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/08/03/why-i-quit-my-job-
to-s...](http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/08/03/why-i-quit-my-job-to-start-a-
tech-company/)

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6cxs2hd6
Great point. This is, in business, is much the same principle as avoiding
premature optimization, in coding.

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rjjacobson
Definitely agree on the virtue of doing stuff as manually as possible. Really
hard though mentally as you always want to do things the right way. I guess at
such an early stage though, the right way is whatever gets you feedback
quickest.

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bradleysmith
Appreciate the post; have my own complex task also involving sorting that I
was tempted to spin my wheels on building a tech to accomplish. Think I'll
forego, and instead collect data on manual sorting instead.

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wellboy
Very good blog post, if there was a startup manual, this should be in it. :)

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colemorrison
That was awesome and showed a high level of grit and audacity. Kick. Ass.

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quarterto
Shameless offtopic plug: avoiding having to write crawlers and scrapers is
exactly the problem we at <http://import.io> hope to solve.

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helipad
See also Derek Sivers, Version 0.1 = Start lo-fi <http://sivers.org/lofi>

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niftylettuce
here's another one: <https://teelaunch.com>

