How Apoorva Mehta grew Instacart by doing things that don’t scale

YC encourages startups to do things unscalably. I find that this is one of the biggest competitive advantages that a startup has over a larger company, because there's no way that the larger company would be doing those things unscalably. And the idea is that once your product has demand, you can figure out how to scale your product. We took this advice to heart. In the early days of Instacart, you could place orders on our service without there being any shoppers to fulfill those orders. Of course, this meant that I would drop everything that I was doing and fulfill the order myself. Only thing that mattered to us was how fast we were growing and how fast we were executing. One example of this was when we decided to add Trader Joe's to Instacart's offering. Now, there was no API or website which had the item catalog for Trader Joe's. So the only way we could actually get all the item information was to buy one of every single item at Trader Joe's, take it to a studio, take pictures of all those things, and then put them into our catalog. And so that's exactly what we did. Here's actually all the items being lined up before us, taking the picture. Using the same unscalable techniques, we added Whole Foods, Costco, and many other stores, and we realized that we had the best product in the market. We were growing so fast, and our customers loved Instacart. Today, we're in 10 cities in the United States and our revenue is growing by 10% week over week, and has been growing like that for 20 weeks. So far. As we have grown as a company and as a team, we have to now make everything scalable.