Paul Graham argues founders must do unscalable work themselves: send personal DMs, tweet, make videos. AI-generated messages are obvious and fake. Startups succeed because founders make them succeed, not because the market magically adopts the product.
A lot of people ask me what AI software I use to send DMs. The answer is I don't. I use NI, natural intelligence. A lot of people don't want to work. They just want to farm things out to AI or people in the Philippines. But as Y Combinator founder Paul Graham says, sometimes you need to do the unscalable things. This means sitting down and sending individual DMs to people you think are cool. I've seen some people who use AI to reply to posts and they look like idiots. People know it's very obvious when somebody is using AI. When it comes to building relationships, AI can't really do that. Sometimes you got to do it yourself. I'm going to read an excerpt from Paul Graham's essay, Do Things That Don't Scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised, or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. Actually, startups take off because the founders make them take off. That is the advice that every founder and creator needs to hear. Every creator doesn't just blow up. They have to make themselves blow up. They have to will it into existence one DM, one tweet, one video at a time. You can't automate everything. So go out and do the unscalable thing and go do it yourself.
