
Do Things that Don't Scale - allang
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
======
graeme
I saw this on a miniature scale when I created a new subreddit
([http://reddit.com/r/LSAT](http://reddit.com/r/LSAT))

I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally
replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned
the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links.

Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the
place became self-sustaining and grew to 1500 subscribers.

I'm seeing the same thing again with a website I just launched
([http://lsathacks.com](http://lsathacks.com)), which has free LSAT
explanations.

Very positive initial comments, but just letting people know about it hasn't
resulted in a surge of traffic. Instead, I'm going to have to manually recruit
people. Only then will I know if it's worthwhile.

My point is that this doesn't apply just to high growth startups. Almost
anything new requires initial unscaleable effort.

Edit: The LSAT is the Law School Admission Test, a logic test required for
admission to North American law schools.

~~~
vidar
Thats a great way to practice user acquisition.

~~~
graeme
For anyone interested in using a subreddit to practice acquiring users:

Metareddit lets you track all mentions of keywords or phrases across Reddit.
It let me find literally everyone who commented about the LSAT.

[http://metareddit.com](http://metareddit.com)

~~~
babs474
You should give [http://www.commentfindder.com](http://www.commentfindder.com)
a try. I believe it has a more extensive index than metareddit which I'm
pretty sure is based on google search.

I'd love any feedback.

~~~
graeme
Some quick notes. Mostly negative, only because I haven't used it long enough
to notice advantages. Overall, it looks like a good site. Hope these are
helpful:

* I couldn't block subreddits from the feed. In my case, LSAT is also a weapon in some popular videos games. On Metareddit, I was able to block the most common gaming subreddits so those results never came up. * Metareddit produced an actual feed I could check once a day for new comments. This is more of a search engine. * I have to hover over the link to see the subreddit. That's often very relevant

Apart from that, looks good. And obviously, these criticism depend on your use
case. I used metareddit specifically for monitoring.

~~~
babs474
Thanks for the thoughts. I think the monitoring use case is a very natural
next step. Basically "saved" searches.

On commentfindder you can exclude specific subreddits with
"-subreddit:askreddit" syntax or target subreddits by removing the minus. Of
course, I should make this more obvious, right now its kind of a cheat code.

------
guynamedloren
This bums me out. Majorly. I work at a YC startup (which will remain
nameless), and we function exactly the opposite of how this essay suggests. We
aren't huge by any means, but we focus heavily on scale, and suppress ideas
that do not scale. _Automate everything. Nothing should be manual_.

I'm an engineer, but I recognize the importance of fantastic customer service.
While building an iPhone app, I suggested that users should have easy access
to our hotline at every step of the purchase and post-purchase flow in case
they ran into issues. The founder rejected this. Why? "People would be calling
us constantly". We also spent enormous amounts of time and resources tweaking
the app design to perfection (pre-launch), and attempted a massive press
launch with exclusive blog posts/coverage while turning our noses at any sort
of manual user acquisition.

Fast forward 6 months. That product failed.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
_we function exactly the opposite of how this essay suggests_

Not sure if that is the case, but pg wrote last year[1]:

 _A YC partner wrote:

My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've
already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put
through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to
munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just
outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so ..._

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/word.html](http://paulgraham.com/word.html)

~~~
k__
If this happens too often, the person with the ideas is probably the problem,
not the "bad" groups

------
peteforde
"The Perfect Store" is a book about the early days of eBay. The primary
takeaway for me was how they deliberately went to swap meets, flea markets and
garage sales all over America — especially the rural flyover states — and
talked to people. They identified the key influencers and flew many of them to
California to be given VIP treatment. Those folks returned to their
communities as true believers and encouraged their flock to get on the train.
15 years later that investment paid off more than any of them could have
hoped.

That said, I suspect that there are many founders who would be open to taking
the show on the road. It's incredibly daunting to know what that looks like,
or where to start. I feel like it's not laziness, just unknowable to people
used to tech communities and test suites.

To that end, my friend Ted and I think we've figured out how to help these
founders take the leap and get in front of real people. Those people might be
clients, developers or community leaders.

If you're interested in what we're doing, let me know. I'm happy to answer any
questions you have, here.

And if you need help with hard problems, you should definitely call Ted:
[http://usistwo.com/](http://usistwo.com/)

~~~
cpursley
"I suspect that there are many founders who would be open to taking the show
on the road."

I think this should be taken literally by many startups with national scope.
Get the hell out of California, buy a used RV, stick the team in it and travel
city to city while you build the startup. It's cheaper and you'll be able to
meet more customers.

~~~
peteforde
Well, yes: exactly.

I guess you could say that my current "startup" is helping founders do exactly
this. Specifically, the exact part that happens right after you concede that
it's a potentially great idea and right before you have any idea how to make
it happen.

Where to go, who to talk to, and why.

You can follow the origin of the idea starting here:
[http://reedwordsinamerica.squarespace.com/blog/2012/12/17/th...](http://reedwordsinamerica.squarespace.com/blog/2012/12/17/the-
backstory)

------
ggreer
_You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to
make them happy._

I'd like to elaborate on this point, because it's probably the most valuable
thing I learned while working at Cloudkick.

Similar to how every Marine is a rifleman, I think every developer should be
tech support[1]. It's an incredibly easy way to please users. Many customers
don't realize how small your company is. They expect an experience similar to
Comcast or Verizon: Listening to on-hold muzak interrupted by advertisements.
Forced to enter obscure info such as an account number on a billing statement.
Getting handed between people in various departments, each time repeating
answers to the same set of questions.

To your users, it's as if they called Comcast and a cable modem firmware
developer picked up the phone.

Could you imagine how much you would love Comcast if that happened to you?
You'd still love it if the person said, "Oh sorry, that's a bug in our
firmware. We'll probably have it fixed by tomorrow. I'll contact you with an
update then."

That sort of support is impossible in a larger company. It makes your users
outrageously happy. Many of them will praise you publicly and tell their
friends how great you are.

1\. Modulo standard disclaimers, working at a small startup, etc. I also think
everyone should be in the on-call rotation, but that's another can of worms.

~~~
redguava
I disagree with having developers do tech support. In fact I think it's
insulting to those that are great at tech support. Tech support is a skill in
itself, not just a place to let developers play.

If you really care about support, you'll have people with that expertise doing
it.

Also, developing is really something where being in the zone gets the most
productivity, and support is usually an intermittent and sporadic distraction,
it can be a real productivity killer.

I see why people say this in pricinple, I just don't think it's a good idea in
practice.

~~~
kragen
Tech support is a skill in itself, but it's also a crucial feedback channel
for learning how users use your software. Empathy with users is what lets you
distinguish a good programming decision from a bad programming decision when
it comes to the software. Distinguishing good programming decisions from bad
ones is what programmers do all day.

It's possible for tech support to work out as a disruptive distraction, but it
doesn't always have to be that way. And yes, there are programming things
where being in the zone is crucial, but there are usually programming things
where it isn't, too.

------
Jd
TLDR: Startups that try to focus on big launches are generally lazy. Success
comes from putting in extraordinary effort to putting your customer first.
This means you get super-enthusiastic users. This works by the principle of
compound growth as users tell their friends.

Somewhat ironically I am of the opinion that:

(A) this is one of pg's best and most useful essays ever

(B) it is partially more useful because it is longer and more experience
driven than some of his other "classic" essays (i.e. the theory behind why
blub is bad and lisp is great)

(C) it is too long and could have been edited down a bit more

~~~
scribu
I agree that it's one of his most useful essays ever.

I didn't find it particularly long, though. It would be great if more top
links on HN were as in-depth as this.

~~~
lmm
It felt like the main difference from most essays is that this one give lots
of concrete examples of everything he talks about.

I'm in two minds about this. It makes it more accessible, but seems like it
could divert attention away from the general point to the specific companies.

------
jmtame
This is probably my favorite PG essay to date, something I've spent a lot of
time thinking about as well.

I think what separates novice investors from good ones is that a novice
investor will start asking questions that only make sense at a later stage.
They're committing a cardinal crime in startups: premature optimization. For
some reason, even though they explicitly say they invest at the seed stage,
they're looking at it from a warped lens of "let me think about how this
works, in your current implementation, at enormous degree of scale." And of
course the implementation will change, so the logic immediately breaks down on
itself because you're assuming the thing you see now will be the same in 5 or
10 years. The baby analogy seems perfect for this reason. A baby will arguably
have little to no resemblance to itself in 5 or 10 years, everything about it
will have changed significantly.

The nice thing is you don't have to explain these things to the investors that
"get it." It just clicks instantly, and I think this happens even before the
meeting--it probably goes all the way back to the introduction that someone
else makes for you. Good investors at a seed stage understand there's some
degree of risk in a small yet still fragile startup that has at least some
degree of promise to it. From the top tier people I've spoken to in the past,
they focus less on the specific numbers and metrics, and more on the "does
this fundamentally solve a problem in the market right now? Is there a real
need for this thing to exist, and what's better about this than everything
else out there?" They look at similar companies in different spaces and draw
interesting comparisons. "You guys are like this other company, which started
out much like you did, and you're applying a very similar solution. I think
this will work!"

The really good investors don't try and evaluate your company as a Series D
investment, they look at where you are right now at the seed stage and see it
for what it is, and what it could be. I suppose this all sounds obvious, but
the real world is full of surprises that contradict assumptions.

------
kyro
The initial grind is a part of the startup fairytale that I feel is so often
overlooked, yet is often the most interesting.

It shows just how the founders built their engine, the pieces they had to
forge, parts that needed to be jammed together in some way to just barely
function, components that were thrown out for costing too much and working too
little. Every successful startup has their own engine. Some may be exact
replicas of others. They work because the problems they tackle have been well
explored. And others are bespoke, tailored specifically to handle truly
difficult problems, and which require an immense amount of exploration,
experimentation, failure, and restarts. That's why an Instagram can take off
with less refinement and horsepower than an Airbnb -- we've developed the
tools and built the maps to tread on one terrain, but not the other.

------
eli
Totally agree.

It's been discussed on HN before, but here's another concrete example of this
sort of thinking: killing the no-reply address. IMHO, there is no reason your
startup should use no-reply for any emails, ever. Yes, it's a hassle to sort
through all the out of office replies, but it's worth it.

Even if you tell people not to, they _will_ reply to your newsletter or order
confirmation or forgotten password message. And -- better yet -- they're often
complaints! I like reading complaints. It's easy to find people to tell you
you're doing great; I want to hear more about how we can improve. At my
startup we make a point to reply to just about every message someone sends us
(customer or not), but that's _especially_ true of complaints. More than once
I've gotten back replies like, "Wow I didn't expect anyone to read [my rant
about how the site doesn't work on an Android 1.6 tablet]. Thanks for getting
back to me!"

~~~
pg
Yes, that's a great example.

------
graycat
Thanks, I needed that.

Since I haven't launched yet, I have a big file system directory (a _folder_ )
of articles on how to get initial _publicity_ and users. While there is a lot
good in that collection, it has looked to me like in total it wouldn't be good
enough to get my little airplane off the ground.

For an example of the contrast, PG's essay had essentially no mention of an
important role for _publicity_ \-- e.g., contact a writer at C|NET,
TechCrunch, etc. for an article. Instead the essay had something that a
founder could do on day one -- contact people they know and ask them to try
it. Or try it for them and give them the results. And find a way to get
feedback and then tweak the functionality. _Good_.

The essay just went to the top of my stack of how to launch. Best _face
validity_ with also the best author credibility, experience, and background of
anything I've got on how to launch.

Sounds good. Write a little more software and then _launch_ , one user at a
time \-- people in the family, people I knew at school, neighbors on my
street, the guy I buy pizza from, the guy who repairs my car, etc.

Maybe I'll print up a supply of business cards that invite people to connect
to the URL and then use the e-mail address there to give feedback!

Heck, maybe I will even be able to get some useful feedback from some VCs!

------
kevinalexbrown
I'd be curious to know good ways to balance these various things that don't
scale. I speak from a position of inexperience, but I can't imagine a fragile
startup could possibly max out any of them. Given that, what are some
heuristics for allocating focus across several unscalable efforts? Put another
way, what are cues to focus more on one thing than another?

~~~
pg
See the section labelled "Compass" here:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)

~~~
rattray
Thanks for posting this here. May even be worth mentioning in a footnote of
this essay, as it provides a terrific bit of context.

------
blankenship
PG’s point about a lot of startup founders having an engineering background is
hugely relevant to this, beyond his assertion that “customer service is not
part of the training of engineers.“

Systems that don’t scale, or that are reliant on the grunt work of humans, are
not part of the training of engineers either. For so many engineers, an
unscalable, human-dependant system is a bug, not a feature.

Is it too hyperbolic to say doing things that don’t scale runs counter-
intuitive to an engineering mindset? (I’m a left-brained, analytical, systems-
minded designer, so I’m definitely not trying to throw stones at my peers.)

~~~
VLM
“customer service is not part of the training of engineers.“

There's a huge cultural issue, its not just education. I'm not agreeing with
this, but I'm going to tell it like it is, ignoring the problem isn't going to
make it go away. So, that disclaimer said, "Engineering is for the smart kids,
the ones smart enough not to end up working $8/hr until their call center gets
offshored." "You better spend 80 hour weeks on your own time learning (trendy
language of the week) or you'll end up in a call center at $8/hr until your
job is offshored." "If I wanted to tell people which key is the 'any' key then
I wouldn't have wasted all the time and money going to university." "I would
never date someone working in the call center" "Sure its a call center, but
sometimes we promote people out if they're any good" That's just real world
modern business culture, and it needs to be addressed completely not "well, if
we add a seminar to the engineering curriculum that'll surely take care of it"

At all companies I've work at, pretty much everyone thought customer service
was the lowest possible level of humanity. Which is too bad; a mere job
shouldn't define someones (self) worth as a human.

Places that claim to prioritize CS are usually just marketing, and certainly
don't really mean it. If they did, their employment policies and wages would
reflect it. They never do.

(edited to note, obviously this is a huge wedge a startup can take advantage
of. Having someone who can speak English and expects to be rewarded
financially is going to result in somewhat better service than modern
international megacorp inc (bad) script readers)

------
thejteam
I was watching a presentation the other day and heard a relevant story. It was
about one of the early internet companies during the first dotcom boom. It was
a change of address service. You would input your information and the services
you needed to cancel and/or change the address for and it would handle it for
you. This was in the early days of the consumer web, so none of these
companies had APIs for this company to call or even thier own web forms. This
company processed its early orders using old ladies at typewriters and fax
machines.

I really wish I could remember the name of the company, but theyr were
acquired very quickly for a stupidly large sum of money.

~~~
fbuilesv
This reminded me about Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter III
([http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html)),
where he talks about a company called PayMyBills. PayMyBills would handle the
user's bills and send them electronic reports of the bills each month.

Their strategy required the user to manually call each service provider to
change the physical address to PayMyBills' so they would receive all the paper
and process it. This created huge barrier of entry (who wants to call every
single provider to change their address?). At the same time, if you end up
signing up you're likely to stay in because of the time it took you to go
service by service to change your address again.

FWIW I don't know what happened to PayMyBills but today their site redirect's
to one of Intuit's service.

------
gfodor
A great article. One major point that I think would have been worth including
though is that if you are not interacting regularly with happy customers, and
making unhappy customers happy, you are denying yourself probably the single
most motivating factor when doing a startup. A single positive review on the
App Store or through e-mail can get me through an entire day of grinding out
bugs. If you don't have the humility and empathy required to genuinely enjoy
providing customer service for a product you have developed, then you are
probably in the wrong game.

------
sriramk
I can think of quite a few startups that used a big bang launch with press
with success. Off the top of my head - Instagram (MG's series of pieces on
Techcrunch), Mailbox, Flipboard, Square, Path. I get where PG is coming from
but press can help bootstrap a network effect if you have none.

~~~
pg
One of the reasons I wrote "there may be a handful that just grew by
themselves" is that every time I learn the story behind one of these apparent
instant successes, it turns out it wasn't so instant. I don't know the stories
of all these companies, but I do know that Instagram's launch was preceded by
a lot of manual recruitment of influential users.

~~~
derefr
Would you recommend that strategy--having a quiet, unmemorable, word-of-mouth-
driven initial launch (which you can call a "beta period"), and then, once
you've already got some hooks into the press and a good userbase, a follow-on
publicity stunt (which you can call a "launch")?

~~~
philfreo
This worked well for us at Close.io <[http://close.io.>](http://close.io.>)

We had a couple "soft launches" \- one where we put up our first email-
collecting landing page and invited some people we knew to use the service
(Sept '12). Another where we turned on self-signup on our website and invited
more people (Nov '12).

Then after a couple months we had some solid active users and a small number
of customers, we were also able to get 2-3 good press articles in the same
week, which we now consider our official launch (Jan '13).

I think it's good advice to just keep "launching" until somebody notices :)

------
PanMan
Great article. I also like Dereck Sivers post on manual work:
[http://sivers.org/hi](http://sivers.org/hi) doing things that don't scale

~~~
cpursley
Yep, a classic.

------
6thSigma
PG, I'm curious if you have any data among your startups that tests user
recruitment methods. For instance, maybe you've seen that Reddit is great for
gaining users in consumer startups but cold calling is great for B2B startups.

I think the biggest difficulty non-"famous" hackers face in user recruitment
is it's hard to figure out where and how to successfully do it.

------
sethbannon
PG, can you give a couple examples of enterprise startups that took the
"consulting" approach to establishing successful (largely productized)
businesses?

~~~
slaxman
37signals is one of them. They were in the software consulting business and
built applications for in house use to manage their projects. They later
realized that their clients need those applications as well.

I believe tumblr was a side project as well while the founder was consulting

~~~
jorde
I think this isn't what Seth meant: there's a lot of consultancies turned into
product companies but it's different to start running a startup and then to
work with your clients to find product market fit etc.

I would also be interested of examples

~~~
teebs
At least one example is [http://rjmetrics.com/](http://rjmetrics.com/) \- I
saw the founder speak for a class I was in a few years ago. Their story is
basically that they went to small companies offering analytics services and
shaped their services based on what these companies asked for.

------
EGreg
This is great advice. But I wanted to briefly mention an alternative
perspective. We did things very differently.

Now two years later we have 250,000 monthly users, and we're getting ready to
roll out our technology to them in a few months.

When you are building an app for people, businesses, or whoever, you have to
go where they congregate. Pick an existing social network with a messaging
channel that people haven't grown apathetic to. Then you have to have an
onboarding process that's simple. Then you have to develop a sales process and
maybe even incentivize your existing users to sign up others. Viral
coefficients decrease your user acquisition cost. And so forth.

That's why we built our framework. We spent two years solving the problem of
"how do you build the next generation of successful, useful apps? And soon we
will see if we were right.

I wrote this back in 2008:
[http://luckyapps.com/blog/?p=12](http://luckyapps.com/blog/?p=12)

~~~
wslh
I remember the cofounder of Dropbox also talking about this in an Stanford
video. He was talking about promoting it, with ads, in Reddit. I think this
kind of advice is the one where we need to put more focus instead of dev
issues.

------
ph0rque
PG, thanks for this essay, it is such an encouragement for us, giving us a
plan for how to approach our startup
([http://automicrofarm.com/](http://automicrofarm.com/)) growth for the next
few months.

~~~
jacquesm
I totally love the concept you guys are working on.

~~~
ph0rque
Thanks, most people do. However, I'm afraid the concept is a bit too "puppies
and rainbows". It won't be an easy road to get to the point that our products
resemble the concept. In the meantime, we've gotten back some feedback (mostly
from the aquaponics subreddit) that our existing prototype (
[http://blog.automicrofarm.com/post/48893635647/autonanofarm-...](http://blog.automicrofarm.com/post/48893635647/autonanofarm-
for-sale) ) is too expensive and not high-enough quality.

So, there's a lot of work for us to do yet.

------
asah
This is brilliant, easily a top-10 of PGs.

re: consulting-- one advanced technique is to put the consulting "into a box"
i.e. define precisely what the consulting package is, and offer this standard
service at a standard price. If investors/etc. give you flak, tell them that
your customers need this anyway, and at least your getting paid for the
trouble. FYI I'm doing this now: many of our customers are young companies
that need advice, and instead of taking an hour+ to give it free, we take a
few hours and charge them. The actual work can be delivered by a number of
people, so it scales fine.

adam (6 startups, 3 IPOs - #7 takes this advice to a whole new level and we're
winning big, in spite of concern from my friends in tech, who exactly fall
into the trap PG is talking about)

------
danial
I'm sure a lot of this is not new for some of you. I'm working on a product
[1] and had all sorts of assumptions that I am revisiting after reading this.

 _I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn 't work: the
Big Launch._

This set me right. I have been obsessing over the big launch. I laughed at
myself after reading this.

 _And on a tuesday, of course, since they read somewhere that 's the optimum
day to launch something._

Yep, that's me. I'm anticipating ridicule from my friends.

 _The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly
universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as
scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you 're going
to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the
company going._

I kept thinking that adding features was the way to keep getting more
customers. My minimum viable product was a build system + share-new-version-
with-beta-users. The laborious things I needed to do to acquire new customers
I thought were adding new features: add a package manager, add test
integration feature, add a code review tool, add iOS support, and so on. It
just dawned on me that I haven't thought about the other laborious things I
need to pay attention to: meet with the numerous mobile developers I know, do
demos at local meetups, and constantly talk to people about my product.

[1] [https://appramp.io/](https://appramp.io/)

------
rmorrison
_Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you 're going to
build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the
company going._

This is probably the most important thing a new entrepreneur needs to realize.
Envisioning a world where everybody is using your product isn't enough. You
need to figure out how to get to that world from this one, and that is where
many entrepreneurs don't have a strategy, and subsequently fail.

------
larrys
"There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users
individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit
at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably
be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one
founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and
marketing."

Mike Arrington, before he was of Techcrunch fame, recruited us personally for
the new company he had been hired as CEO/President of, Pool.com. Lest anyone
thinks he does not know how to hustle he does. He can and was very persistent
and determined with anything I threw at him. That ended up being a great
relationship lasting many many years after Mike left the company. I feel
fairly certain that a regular biz dev guy would have given up with what I
threw at Mike. You may not have heard of Pool.com but they made a ton of money
and were very successful.

------
pshin45
I find it fascinating that, with YC and HN, PG has essentially created a
"business school for hackers" that is free, open to anyone, and makes it
faster and easier for any hacker to gain a solid understanding of business and
marketing principles.

And yet on the flip side, I see no one in the MBA/business world who is
effectively doing the opposite i.e. creating a forum and/or institution in the
mold of YC/HN for "business guys" to develop a fundamental understanding of
(and respect for) technical leadership and software engineering concepts. I
wonder why... Is it because it's more difficult, or more because business
people just don't care and never will?

People often say that YC changed the VC industry, but in a way I think the YC
and HN models together are slowly but surely disrupting the "business
education industry" as well.

Thoughts?

~~~
bickfordb
My experience is that many product managers (who often are originally software
engineers / in technical roles) end up in MBA programs

------
Patrick_Devine
Even though PG didn't say it, a lot of ideas in this essay reminded me of Eric
Reis / Lean Startup thinking. Getting off your ass and giving your customers
rock star treatment is essentially the same as the "Genchi Genbutsu"
philosophy that ER goes on about. The idea of an initial "manual" service like
which Stripe provided is the same thing as a "Concierge MVP".

I have to say, as someone who left a big Fortune 500 company (which was a
start-up when I joined it) just one week ago to start my own company, it's
pretty refreshing to read articles such as this one. It's completely
antithetical to being stuck in a large software group where you're trying
desperately to have any contact whatsoever with customers to try and figure
out what they want.

EDIT: spelling

------
nowarninglabel
It's still easy to mess up this process though, at least, that's how I feel
about RepairPal. I got an e-mail from my credit union suggesting them, and it
was perfect timing cause I had just bought a used car that needed some
repairs. So, I signed up, put in the info, and...nothing. No response
whatsoever. But then, their marketing team sent me a semi-personalized e-mail
requesting feedback. Awesome, so I wrote about the service not providing me
with anything, and stating that I wanted to still use the service, I just
hadn't been provided any response. And...again...nothing.

Now, I'll never use RepairPal. They've wasted my time twice. So, if you're
going to take the time to reach out to users manually, make sure to actually
follow up on the responses you receive.

~~~
johnrob
Unfortunately, a billion minus one is still a large number. Thus, the penalty
for annoying individual users is pretty much nothing unless it turns into bad
PR.

------
stephengillie
Who wants to start a user-acquisition startup?

~~~
pg
We've funded several startups doing components of that. It's hard to do in the
general case.

Essentially, every startup is a user-acquisition startup in its own domain,
and it's hard to beat the good ones at their specialty.

~~~
dominotw
But the domains can be divided into general classes of users. If jawbone can
recruit me for it UP band then withings can also recruit me for its body
analyzer. Not all startups in health segment have do its own health conscious
user recruiting. There is a lot of overlap between products and I am sure
there is some market for a generic user recruitment.

~~~
1337biz
My suspicion is that you don't want generic users. You want users who are
going to stick with your product for a while and not jump from one train to
another. Without them thinking that your product stands out changes are pretty
low that they are going to talk with somebody else about it.

------
stcredzero
In other words, the only new markets that will be available will be the ones
that are protected by some sort of "potential barrier." Otherwise, they would
already be actively exploited.

------
akshat
"But (like other ways of bestowing one's favors liberally) it's safe to do it
so long as you're not being paid to."

We at blogVault love the above line. We often have our customers ask us for
help with things completely unrelated to what we do. However, we always refuse
to be paid for it. We always tell them that we are in the business of backups.
Everything else we will help out but could not accept any payments for. It
ensures that we don't have to commit to deadlines etc.

------
kyle_martin1
Holy shit. This is exactly what I've been doing and it's working incredibly
well. For PG to confirm everything I've been doing...I'm on cloud nine.

------
edanm
This is a great essay. But since it's long, I suspect some people won't get to
the last few paragraphs, which are IMO the most important:

"The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly
universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as
scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going
to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the
company going."

As someone in the "Startup Scene" for many years, and especially as a Software
Consultant, I've talked with hundreds of people about their startups. And this
is probably the _number one_ insight I wish more people had - startups are not
just "having an idea" (what people used to think), they're also not just "idea
* execution" (which is a great concept but incomplete). Rather, the
fundamental building blocks of a startup is "what are you doing" and "how are
you getting users". Almost everything else can be missing in the high level
discussion, but not those two. It's taken me many years to understand this,
and PG just put it in a very succint form.

------
soneca
I had an odd way to follow this advice. I am learning to code and in 4 months
I went from no knowledge at all to learning basic CSS/Html to basic C# to
basic MVC to be able to launch and start selling a useful enough SaaS to
acquire a few paying customers. I am just not a good enough developer to
automate everything, I can't even code properly without Visual Studio helping
me.

I am not dangerous, but I now know enough to be useful. I am trying to make my
customers happy. The first feature I added after launch was something my first
paying customer asked.

My product helps senior citizens to control their medications (what, when and
how many pills they must take, which days, and alert when they need to buy
more pills). I will start to put handouts on drugstores. Better than hoping
elderly internet users know their way through google ads.

I spent 3 hours watching the first prospect to ever use my product taking a
look at it for the first time (that would be my father). I left with literally
50 notes of what I should do immediately and some more thoughts of future
features.

I am not a hacker, but I guess this helped me thinking more about what people
want, because there was not much I could do from my own ideas and knowledge.

~~~
deepGem
Speaking from personal experience, it's easier to pick up the traits of
customer development/leadership/design with an engineering background. On the
contrary, I've seen some of the smartest non engineer MBAs give up on
programming. Not sure why.

~~~
soneca
I am not particularly smart, nor a MBA, or a McKinsey. I am learning to code
to be useful, to build something useful, not build something great.

I would say that smart MBA try to learn to code to build something great, the
next Dropbox, something that match their ambitions. When patio11 is your
reference, not Bill Gates, or Zuckerberg, it is easier to keep your
motivation. (Please, don't read this as me saying patio11 is not a great
engineer, i couldnt know, just to illustrate the difference of ambition)

------
alexjv89
I read this article 2 days ago in the night and that night I stayed awake all
night. This is one killer article that made a lot of sense to me. As a freshly
graduate engineer trying to startup, I am making the exact mistakes as
mentioned in this article. I did try to automate tasks so that I can handle
1000's of users, when there is barely 2 people knocking at the door. What is
even worse is that I do not even consider talking to these 2 people knocking
on the door - I am an engineer, I am too busy trying to automate the process
that I dont have the time to spend time with the customers, my code will. I
cant believe how accurate the article is.

The reason for not talking to customers - I am hesitant - I am an engineer, I
design stuff, I dont talk to people, that is not my job. I guess the problem
and automate the system do that 100s of thousands of people can use it.

After reading the article, for the last 2 days I was very restless, maybe I
still am. I was hesitant. But today I took the courage to take the product to
the user and sat with him, showed the product and tried to solve just his
problem, in a non scalable manner.

For those who might want to know exactly with respect what I am talking about.
I launched a crowdfunding campaign for a hardware product -
www.indiegogo.com/projects/tangle . The project is still live. The reason for
doing the crowdfunding campaign was it because I was shy going around selling
the product door to door. I did take feedback from friends but it I wanted to
put it up on a platform and let things happen by itself. After launching the
campaign, I realize how much people hustle to get the product to work on a
crowdfunding campaign. Now I am taking the product offline and trying to sell
it to customers directly.

This post is kickass... It just injected a lot of sense into me.

------
gwu78
I like this essay a lot.

In the early days of Apple, the founders placed minimum orders for parts on
30-day credit, then built the computers in 10 days and sold them before the
payment for the parts came due. There wasn't any sexy software at that point.
Apple was a hardware startup.

Web startups are in general probably more attractive to VC, but I'm excited
about hardware startups.

~~~
wslh
I am excited too but since it is a mass scale business I think it is important
to focus on machines/robots to build the hardware.

~~~
gwu78
But at what stage do you adopt this focus? From Day 1? The point of the
anecdote about Apple is that they began their startup by doing something
unscalable. Not only was building computers by hand unscalable, but the
financial risk they took was unreasonable. What if they failed to sell enough
of their computers to cover the cost of the parts?

Many businesses that you see as "mass scale" may have began life as "small
scale" ones. Check your assumptions.

------
pixelmonkey
Loved this essay, but I'm a little confused by this footnote.

"[5] If you're building something for which you can't easily get a small set
of users to observe—e.g. enterprise software—and in a domain where you have no
connections, you'll have to rely on cold calls and introductions. But should
you even be working on such an idea?"

When pg says, "Should you even be working on such an idea?" \-- is he saying
that he questions any startup that is focusing on enterprise and which cannot
be sold to fellow founders in a YC batch?

He once wrote "enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge
amounts of money", so I suppose he doesn't love enterprise software that
doesn't have a long tail customer base.

But, wouldn't this exclude a lot of interesting ideas in education,
healthcare, government, finance, etc.?

~~~
Spooky23
You need to understand the secret handshakes and domain trivia in a particular
enterprise space to be successful.

I have worked in government IT for years. When some breathless sales dude
tells me that he has some sort of amazing solution for X that allowed Goldman
Sachs to cure the common cold, I'm intrigued. When the sales dude doesn't know
what a government procurement contract is, I just shake my head, because we
probably wasted an hour or more talking about it. Worst case scenario, the
sales dude captures the imagination of some big shot and gets fired because
instead of selling stuff, he wasted 6 months filling out forms and missed his
quota.

The guys who sell to my vertical already know how I'm going to buy the
product, and sell to the attributes of the product that matter to us.

------
chacham15
> And except in domains with big penalties for making mistakes, it's often
> better not to aim for perfection initially.

I feel like this exception is another potential pitfall because it is so easy
to think e.g. "if this doesnt look polished, users will think that we arent
professional" and that is a big hit.

Although that is a more clear case, there are more ambiguous ones: imagine
that your startup is doing encrypted email. What level of
encryption/protection do you go with at launch? Do you go with the best
practices as good as the founders know of or do you get an audit from tptacek?
The latter is probably wayy out of your price range as a startup, but if your
security takes a hit people wont know if they can trust you with their
important information. What is the right line to go with here?

------
tempestn
The point about paying extreme attention to a single user's needs reminded me
very much of _Stop Developing for the 90% Use Case_ :
[http://gist.io/5561992](http://gist.io/5561992), which came up here a couple
months back.

Basically it demonstrates the problem with aiming for the best ratio of user
satisfaction to effort in each feature of your product. If each part of what
you build covers 90% of users' needs, that sounds pretty good. But if your
product has X main features, the percentage of users who will be entirely
satisfied is 90%^X, which gets low very quickly.

You need to focus on servicing all of _someone 's_ needs, not most of
everyone's, but consequently all of no one's.

------
johnrob
If you're willing to do whatever it takes, you can probably round up a group
of early users (unless your idea is terrible). I think few founders really
doubt their ability to do this. What the founders are really looking for is
some validation that the users will eventually grow to a large number. But if
the mentality is to compare your early startup with the early version of
Pinterest, it will be very hard to find any evidence that yours won't find
similar success. A startup is thus an inevitable leap of faith.

In a way, this essay deflates the concept of 'proof' in the lean startup
mentality. There is no way to prove that an idea will be a good one (although
you can probably filter out particularly bad ones).

------
andrewflnr
I've been thinking about this "narrow focus" idea, and I'm not sure how to or
whether I should apply it to my own idea. I'm working on building a tool
that's supposed to provide a free-form way to record and organize ideas. I
think it could be especially useful to writers, and I use my prototype for
task tracking. But if I target it to any specific group, I'm afraid it will
get pigeon-holed as a "writer's tool" or "task tracking tool" or whatever, and
it will be hard to generalize from there, especially once I start adding
domain-specific features. How does one usually make the transition between
niche and general markets?

~~~
mjmahone17
From someone who's never actually done the startup thing: when you feel like
your product is good enough to stand alone, outside of the specific domain you
originally targeted for, you likely have to have a second round of "initial"
user acquisition, where you cater to, and iterate on, the needs of more
general users you recruit.

~~~
andrewflnr
But if you try too hard to get that one domain, you may not reach a point
where it's "good enough to stand alone, outside..." because, while your
execution was good, you moved in the wrong direction.

------
aaronbrethorst
Related:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html)
and
[http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

------
jamesrcole
Good article. One small thing that wasn't clear to me is

 _The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be
the best you ever get. When you 're so big you have to resort to focus groups,
you'll wish you could go over to your users' homes and offices and watch them
use your stuff like you did when there were only a handful of them._

Why can't you do that once the company gets to a certain size? I don't have
any experience with these things, so it's not clear to me. Surely there must
be some better alternative than focus groups.

~~~
arkades
Sample error.

When you had 100 users, it was feasible to get detailed feedback on 90 out of
100 users. When you have 1.5m users, you cannot get detailed feedback on 1.35m
users. Dealing with much smaller fractions of your user base, sampling error
grows into larger and larger an issue. That's not to say there aren't
wonderful statisticians working on sampling issues, but fundamentally it's not
the same as _actually_ interacting with the vast majority of your user base.

------
sambe
I think a key thing here is "plan to systematically do something that doesn't
scale if the rewards are big enough". And the common bias is thinking that the
rewards are not as big as they are. If it's in your top 3 problems and manual
work is a path to scaling automatically, you should probably do it.

However, at some point short-term velocity is also contributing speed bumps
that are barriers for reaching the next level. I certainly wouldn't want to be
doing this ad-hoc or without consideration.

------
marcamillion
Whoa....this footnote flies in the face of the 'charge early' crowd:

 _[8] If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and
those that will pay the most, it 's usually best to pick the former, because
those are probably the early adopters. They'll have a better influence on your
product, and they won't make you expend as much effort on sales. And though
they have less money, you don't need that much to maintain your target growth
rate early on._

Very interesting perspective.

~~~
31reasons
Note that is probably written for the Startup goes VC route. It may be
different for the Bootstrappers.

~~~
marcamillion
True. Either way...a famous refrain is to charge as quickly as possible.

------
aylons
I am so glad to read something about hardware startups here. As a engaged
hardware engineer who aims to build my own company soon, I miss reading more
about hardware startups.

Funny thing, I read the whole OP thinking about how all these ideas would work
in a hardware startup, and came to conclusions similar to his before reaching
the point about it in the article.

Crowdfunding brought some fresh air to this world, but I still miss an active
community as the software startup one is. Maybe I am missing something?

------
wildermuthm
Great essay. But I'm surprised PG didn't mention Pretotyping. Here's the
Pretotyping PDF that hammers the point: make sure you are building the right
IT before you actually build IT:

[https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0QztbuDlKs_ZTk2M2RhZWItYzk3...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0QztbuDlKs_ZTk2M2RhZWItYzk3YS00ZDZmLTgyZjItY2Y2ZWIyYjZkOTE3/edit?hl=en_US)

------
k-mcgrady
Took a lot from this essay. I've a pretty short attention span and usually
drop out half way through essays this long but I read this to the end. As
someone preparing to launch in a few weeks and trying to get some customers
signed up for launch there was some great advice here on acquiring customers
and treating them right. Thanks PG.

------
dominik
Excellent essay. Good detail. I like the longer format.

Reminded me of, all people, Mother Teresa. She started in Calcutta in 1948.
People mocked her: What difference do you think taking care of one poor person
will make? But that was her focus: One person at a time. "Do small things with
great love."

So too in the quite different field of technology startups.

~~~
ashayh
Your analogy is accurate in theory.

However, Teresa and those like her are a total fraud.

------
jayzalowitz
PG: Do you see any other things founders typically think are going to scale
and don't? (not-quite-unlike conferences)

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

Aren't lots of service companies killed this way? Bending over backward for
some client? Maybe they are small companies rather than startups...

Guess I'm being picky though: pg's point is an excellent one.

~~~
arigoi
I interpret "bending over backwards" as compromising the business model, which
does have the potential to kill the business. However, I believe pg is
alluding to good customer service.

------
brandonhsiao
It's interesting that what pg writes in this essay is implicit in the word
_scale_. If you think about what it means to scale, it means your level of
automation grows as your number of users grows. If you don't have many users,
it doesn't make sense to automate too much.

~~~
genn843
It's not about whether it makes sense to automate or not... it is about how
vital for a young startup it is to do things that a big company wouldn't do
(hence cannot scale) to make the client feel special: e.g. sending the client
a hand-written note from the CEO. The article is really great and I think it
really makes the point that such seemingly unnecessary actions can make the
difference. Great read!

------
sinzone
PS: Brian Chesky of Airbnb came out first with advisig people in doing things
that don't scale.

------
spinachthrow
So the general idea is that lack of scalability within a domain is a barrier
to entry? If so, then the real barrier to entry is finding the domain, not the
actual schlep - big companies can schlep pretty well, right?

------
omegant
Thank you PG!, this post it's perfectly timed for us. And I was a bit lost on
how to begin looking for users. Not much better now but at least with a
general direction to follow..

------
laureny
It's cute that even though pg is an Internet veteran, he still doesn't
understand how HTML (and the web in general) works and he hardcodes br tags in
his text at 80 columns.

------
omegant
Thank you PG!, this post it's perfectly timed for us. I was a bit lost on how
to begin looking for users. Not much better now but at least with a general
direction to follow..

------
wslh
I think this is the best PG essay because it talks about the human being of
flesh and bones. Probably only this subject deserves a site to fill with real
stories.

------
amac
Excellent read and dead-on. It's something I'm working on every day since
launch and will be a good point of reference should I need reminding.

------
gadders
I realise this is sacrilege but the impression I get from a PG essay is that
you could make the same points in 1/3 the length.

------
patkai
What does the Scotty vs. Kirk comment imply? I don't watch much TV and I'm not
a native speaker so I don't get it.

~~~
btilly
Scotty was in charge of the engines that made the ship go. Kirk was in charge
of the ship, the mission, and interacting with whatever weird things they ran
into.

------
bsaul
thanks for the advice. I was thinking abiut hosting and scaling architecture
before trying to sell my product, but this piece convinced me it's going to be
ok if my first customers run on some dedicated server with everything on it.
i'll have plenty of time to think about VMs and load balancer later.

Most useful post i've read from pg as well.

------
wodow
So the question is: what's the equivalent of an electric starter motor for
businesses/startups?

------
al1x
Does anyone want to summarize this novel?

------
rdl
This is pg's best essay to date.

------
dschiptsov
One more important thing to understand about Jobs "miracle" is that he was
allowed to do what he was obsessed with. No idiotic "manager" or board member
intervene with ideas of "cutting costs" on packaging or materials or any other
fast-food technologies to reduce the product to the mix of cheapest and
crapest ingredients imaginable. No idiots insisted that it is much more
"effective" to just add a "theme" to and old code, to make it look like touch-
capable (hi Symbian, WinCE) etc. No one said that re-implementing from
scratch, because everything else is crap is costly and time-consuming, and so
on.

There are lots of people with good taste, sense of style and quality (read
Pirsig's book) and enough self-discipline to follow do what one is preaching,
but it is an extreme rare situation when such people have enough influence to
make things their own way.

I guess a half of YC business is about trying to spot an employ such obsessed
individuals, no matter what exactly they want to accomplish. Early funding of
even one of such guys worth waiting and funding hundreds of mediocre,
especially if one has connections to channel or sell them off.)

Igor Sysoev was obsessed with efficiency (in that time c10k problem was
actual), so src/core and src/os/unix should be taught in colleges (btw, the
module system is already an over-engineered mess).

There are many other examples, but the big idea is simple - spot the right
people, all that numerous micro-optimizations, while valuable, are
superficial.

~~~
gruseom
Fred Wilson said something similar about obsession, though in very different
language:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2721767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2721767).
I like that quote very much.

What (if anything) are you obsessed with?

~~~
dschiptsov
Probably it is that very Russian obsession with the naive notion that most
things in the world are "not right".)

~~~
unimpressive
>naive notion

But aren't they?

~~~
dschiptsov
They are, but the causes are even uglier and grounded deeply in so-called
human nature which cannot be changed. So, less-naive approach is to understand
and accept things as they are.

------
tteam
We gotta say this. We have never been a fan of pg's essays.

BUT THIS ONE IS GEM. Probably the Best. Also remember, even after doing all
this there is no guarantee that your startup will succeed. But this one has
all the optimal paths.

