Paul Graham's 'Do Things That Don't Scale', Quoted

Paul Graham's advice to early startups is to do the manual, unglamorous work that can't scale, starting with recruiting users one by one. His July 2013 essay Do Things that Don't Scale opens: "One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale."

This post walks through the essay's main points in Graham's words. Each quote links to the original essay.

What is the most common unscalable thing to do?

Graham names it directly: "The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually."

He argues founders skip it because they underestimate compounding. His numbers:

"If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week. And while 110 may not seem much better than 100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you'll be surprised how big the numbers get. After a year you'll have 14,000 users, and after 2 years you'll have 2 million."

How fragile are startups early on?

Very, by Graham's account. His main example is Airbnb, whose early recruiting "consisted of going door to door in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings." He writes:

"Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure."

Another example is Pinterest: "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, and that worked well."

Why delight early users?

Getting users isn't the whole job. Graham writes:

"You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy."

His example is Wufoo, which for a long time sent each new user a hand-written thank-you note. The aim, he writes: "Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made."

He expects founders to worry this won't scale, and answers that larval startups have nothing to lose. If the company grows, "you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you expected."

Does the product have to be great?

Not at first, Graham argues. What should be great is something else:

"It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user."

He adds that "you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness."

When does a narrow market help?

Sometimes on purpose. "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." His example is Facebook, which began only for Harvard students and for a long time stayed limited to specific colleges.

What other unscalable things work?

Graham lists a few more:

• Consulting-style work. "Consulting is the canonical example of work that doesn't scale." Done for one customer by a product company, he says, it is welcomed.
• Doing things by hand behind the scenes. His example: "the way Stripe delivered “instant” merchant accounts to its first users was that the founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant accounts behind the scenes."
• Hardware. Graham describes a catch-22 for hardware startups: "without a product you can't generate the growth you need to raise the money to manufacture your product." He still advises them "to pull a Meraki initially if they can. That's what Pebble did."

What usually doesn't work?

The Big Launch. Graham writes: "I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch." His view of what a launch is for is modest: "All you need from a launch is some initial core of users."

The reason is that users arrive slowly even for good products: "getting users will always be a gradual process — partly because great things are usually also novel, but mainly because users have other things to think about."

He closes the point with a general rule:

"Any strategy that omits the effort — whether it's expecting a big launch to get you users, or a big partner — is ipso facto suspect."

The short version

• Recruit early users by hand. At 10% weekly growth, 100 users becomes 2 million in two years.
• Make the first users very happy; that care scales better than expected.
• The experience should be insanely great, even if the product isn't yet.
• A deliberately narrow market can help.
• Don't count on a big launch or a big partner to do the work.

This post reports what Paul Graham wrote in one essay. To look up what he, Warren Buffett, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen or Naval wrote on your own question, you can ask Mímir. Each answer cites the original essay or letter.