Notes on “Do Things that Don’t Scale”

Subject:

Before you can attract lots of users, you must first seek out a handful of users. This process is often tedious but almost always necessary.

Key Takeaways:

• No matter how good your product may be, it won’t promote itself. 
• Graham likens a startup to a car, saying, “A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.”
• While it can be difficult and discouraging to recruit users one at a time, it’s almost always necessary. 
• “We encourage every startup to measure their progress by weekly growth rate. If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week… if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users manually and then gradually switch to less manual methods.”
• It’s easier to find early adopters when you’re part of your target market. If you’re not, try to understand your most enthusiastic users.
• Leverage small size by paying extra attention to each customer.
• Think about user experience holistically.
• Engaging with users can not only spur growth, but also help you refine your understanding of those users and improve your product. 
• “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.”
• Facebook was originally only for Harvard students, and that specificity helped it attract initial users.
• Due to the high cost of manufacturing, hardware startups often build their own products manually at first. As a pleasant side effect, this approach allows founders to refine their product.
• By designing a product that’s perfect for one user, you’ll often inadvertently design a product that’s useful to a lot of people.
• Treating an early customer like a consulting client can help you improve your product, but you should never actually operate as a consultant or accept compensation for consulting services, as doing so changes your customer’s expectations.
• Functions that would normally be handled by software can be done manually at first.
• Big launches are overrated and possibly even counterproductive.
• “…the unscalable things you have to do to get started are not merely a necessary evil, but change the company permanently for the better.”

Read the original essay at PaulGraham.com