A short talk (YouTube transcript) of Paul Graham explaining why early-stage startups should deliberately perform manual, non-scalable tasks—like making customers’ products for them—to learn, improve the product, and achieve early growth. He argues hands-on work yields rapid learning, better product design, and that steady percentage growth from small bases leads to exponential scale.
Chapters
Well, what doing things that don't scale means specifically is doing things in a sort of handmade, artisanal, painstaking way that you feel like, yeah, it would be great if you could do things that way forever. But you're in the back of your mind, you think to yourself, well, there's no way we could keep doing this and become giant, right? And what do things that don't scale means is do those things early on anyway. If you don't do them, you'll never be big, so you got nothing to lose. And also, you learn a lot from it. It's so important to get early customers that if you have to do a ton of manual stuff, that's okay. You'll learn a lot from it. Did you guys do manual stuff? Totally. And we thought, oh, we're doing it wrong. This is so lame. And in fact, it was exactly the right thing. We made an online store builder. You could build a store on the Internet and sell stuff. And we would go to would be customers and say, would you like to use our easy online store builder? And they would say, no. And we would say, but you want an online store, right? And they would say, yeah. And we would say, what if we used our software for you to make an online store and then you could have it, Would that be good? And they'd say, all right. And so we'd like, ah, we can't get anyone to use our software, but at least they're willing to let us use it for them. It seemed so lame. Having to use our software myself made it much better because I would be using our software to make someone's website, right? And I was also the guy who wrote the site builder. And so I would be using it and think to myself, ah, this is inconvenient. I would change the software in the middle of using it and then go back to working on their website. And boy, that made the software much better that I had to use it in the beginning. You only have 10 customers. You want to go 10% next week? 10% a week is an ambitious goal. You only got to get one more customer. You can go out and do that very manually. And then next week you have 11 customers. You have to get 1.1 customers, right? Which is basically one. Right? You just keep going out there and doing things manually. And as long as your growth rate is good, it doesn't matter how small the number is, because a constant growth rate means exponential growth, and that means the base number will soon take care of itself.
