paul graham essays do things that don't scale

Louis Bidou

[summary] do things that don't scale, paul graham.

In this essay, Paul Graham tells why startups founders should go for unscalable things at first.

RECRUIT — Recruiting users manually is the most common one. When at Y Combinator, Stripes founders were used to get people try their beta on the spot: “Give me your laptop”. As absolute numbers are small, measure progress by weekly growth rate.

FRAGILE — To locate the most promising vein of users, go for a untargeted launch, observe which kind of users seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them.

DELIGHT — As startups can provide a level of service no company can, try hard to make your initial users happy.

EXPERIENCE — It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. Even with an early, incomplete, buggy product, make the difference with attentiveness. It's the best way to start a very positive feedback loop.

FIRE — Sometimes, focusing on a deliberately narrow market is the right thing to do. It's always worth asking if there's a subset of the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly.

MERAKI — Hardware startups should assemble their own hardware. Pebble did.

CONSULT — B2B startups could pick up a single user and act as consultant building a specific product. Fit its needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something other users want too. But, to retain your freedom, make sure not to be paid.

MANUAL — Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can, do it as long as you can.

BIG — Launches and partnerships usually don't work as a way to get growth started.

VECTOR — Try thinking of startup ideas 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.

Source: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

The Business Dan

Startups, entrepreneurship and business talk, paul graham: do things that don’t scale (essay).

Great essay by Paul Graham on founding a company and participating in the things that you cannot scale. He uses specific examples of companies that did it right, and AirB&B is one of them. They actually met with everyone who signed up to list their home and take them out for coffee, as well as take professional photographs of their homes. Not something that you can scale as you grow but it made all the difference for them. Definitely a read worth checking out.

Link:  Do Things that Don’t Scale Essay

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Doing Things that Don't Scale: Unpacking An Important Concept for Startups Innovation with Mark Peter Davis

• Entrepreneurship

Phuong is back on the podcast this week to discuss the importance of doing things that don't scale in startups. Phuong explains that this concept, popularized by Paul Graham of Y Combinator, involves manually handling processes to acquire customers, test concepts, and iterate on products before scaling. We dive into examples such as Seamless and Diapers.com, showing how hands-on approaches helped them understand customer needs and refine their offerings. We emphasize the importance of prioritizing learning and validation over rapid growth in the initial stages of a startup. Being involved in the early stages helps founders understand their business deeply, which is crucial for long-term success.  Links: Follow us on Twitter: @mpd, @interplayPodcast Links: Website, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn *DISCLAIMER* Interplay Family Office LLC (“Interplay”) is registered as an investment adviser with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Registration of an investment adviser does not imply any level of skill or training. Information about the qualifications and business practices of Interplay is available on the SEC’s website at www.adviserinfo.sec.gov._ Interplay only transacts business in states where it is properly registered or is excluded or exempted from registration requirements. Offering of asset management services through Interplay is pursuant to an investment advisory agreement.The views expressed in this podcast are subject to change based on market and other conditions. The podcast may contain certain statements that may be deemed forward looking statements. Please note that any such statements are not guarantees of any future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected. Any projections, market outlooks, or estimates are based upon certain assumptions and should not be construed as indicative of actual events that will occur.Information communicated during the podcast does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice but is limited to the dissemination of general market information. A professional adviser should be consulted before implementing any of the strategies or options presented. The podcast is not an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy or sell the securities mentioned herein. Neither Interplay nor its advisory persons render tax or legal advice. Please consult your tax and legal advisors for advice concerning your circumstances.

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6 things we do that don’t scale but help us succeed

Inspired by the latest essays from Paul Graham urging startups to Do Things That Don’t Scale and followed up by 37Signal’s Jason Fried’s excellent post about why their newest product is launched using lots of strategies that don’t seem to scale , the Close Team wanted to share some of our most successful hard-to-scale tactics we are using to connect with our users and turn them into raving fans.

1. Calling all new signups

If you sign up for our 14-day free trial and you don’t call us using our software, we surely will call you to say “hi” :)

Benefits: Talking personally to our users is one of the most powerful things we do. It allows us to learn more about them, how they found out about us, what they are looking for in our software, what they like/dislike so far and what it will take to make them succeed with Close .

It’s not rare that people will tell us that that initial call was the one little difference that gave them the last bit of confidence to upgrade and become a customer.

They love to buy sales software developed by a company that knows a lot about sales and practices what it preaches. Go figure :)

Pro tip: If you call someone within 5 minutes of them signing up for your service , your reach rates will typically go up from 25% to 75% so it’s worth trying to strive for the 5 minute mark! This is easy to accomplish in Close by integrating our API in your signup flow.

2. Leaving voicemails after 7 days of trial

When we don’t get a chance to connect with a new user within the first day of their 14-day trial, we make sure we follow up with a call on day 7. If we still can’t reach them, we leave a voicemail telling them we’d love to chat and see if there is anything we can do to help them succeed with their trial.

One distinct advantage we have is that Close is a product that has VoIP integrated so we assign new users with a Close phone number. When we can’t reach them, we actually call their Close number and leave the voicemail there.

The reason? If you get a voicemail in Close, the system sends you an automated email with a link to the call recording on the Close lead page. Since we’re a lead in Close, you get to experience the power of the product, get re-engaged, and hear our personal message.

3. Emailing all users from personal accounts

We send all our users 3–4 emails during their trial. None of our emails come from a "donotreply@" email address. All of them come from a real human being that you can reply to and get in touch with if you have questions. It’s obviously tough to scale this as we continue to grow and it takes a lot of time to respond to all the emails we’re getting.

There are plenty of benefits:

• It helps us help our users succeed with Close.
• It helps us understand what problems/challenges/questions our users have.
• It helps us prioritize product development and come up with new solutions to our customers problems.

4. Giving free hour-long trainings

Something we just recently decided to do is to offer free limitless 1-on-1 training to our customers. What that means is that if you are a customer of Close, we will take the time to do a live online demo and training session with you, answer all your questions and help you setup your entire system and customize it to perfection. There is no time limit to this. We will take as much time as it takes to set you and your team up for success.

Benefits: This has already paid massive dividends. In the last 5 months since our launch, we’ve spend most of our time trying to understand non-Close customers and what they need to become customers.

We’ve always given our customers great support (more on that later) but we didn’t proactively spend a lot of time training them on the product.

Now that we do, we have learned a huge amount from our customers and seen where we can improve the product to make them more successful and our customers loves us more for it (who are a lot less likely to churn as a side-effect).

5. Giving free sales consulting

A new thing we’re just testing is to actually offer our customers free sales consulting. Inspired by HubSpot’s mantra of making marketing superstars, we want to help everyone become a sales superstar.

So we are taking time out of our days to help new startups setup the correct sales workflows, give them feedback on their pitch, their emails, their scripts, their lead generation efforts.

Anything sales related, even though this has nothing directly to do with our product other than the belief that better sales organizations will become better Close customers and make the world a better place at the same time.

6. Offering engineer support (almost) 24/7

We give all our users (trial and paying) support via email, phone and live chat. We don’t have a dedicated support team because everyone at Close—especially our engineering team—does support, inspired by Stripe and others.

This means taking a hit when it comes to engineering productivity for the benefit of our customers and our understanding of their problems and real-life use cases of our software. It also means that when our customers are in most need of help, they can talk to the smartest people in the company to fix their problems and help them out.

This produces happier customers and more empathetic and knowledgeable engineers. Win-win.

What things are your startup doing that don’t scale well but help at being awesome? We want to learn from, and with, you so please share!

Update 6 Dec 2014: We're writing a book titled "The Unscalable Startup". Get notified once it goes life and get a free sample chapter .

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