Garrett Smallwood, VP of Product at Wag, talks about moving fast as a startup. He argues for doing things that don't scale to get early customers, using Stripe and Airbnb as examples of founders who sold directly to their first users.
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So now it comes down to just, like, how to move fast. So I think the first thing is you really need to sell. Like, you just gotta sell yourselves. Is everybody here selling to, like, their first few customers?
Not a lot of people, huh?
Yeah, if you can't sell it, like, no one else is gonna sell it for you. Let's be honest. Like, if you can't sell it, how is someone else gonna sell it? It's crazy. You think someone else is gonna join your company and sell your product for you? Holy moly. Like, if you are not selling your product, signing up your first few customers, like, no one else is gonna do it, and you clearly don't believe. There's an amazing story. Patrick Collison from Stripe, he, at Y Combinator, he would tell people, hey, have you heard of Stripe? And they'd be like, I have no idea what Stripe is. He'd be like, cool, it's like this payment processor thing, I just built it, like, you should use it. And they would go, cool. And he'd be like, send me an email, I'll try it out. He's like, no, no, no, give me your computer, log into your terminal. And he'd like install it for them right then and there. That's how he got like his first 150 customers. And I was a $20 billion company, so like, seems kind of worth it to me, right? So yeah, go door-to-door. I mean, does everybody know the Airbnb story? Chesky went door-to-door in New York.
It's amazing.
That guy, he had 30 days basically until he was gonna be out of money. Paul Graham took him into YC, and they literally said like, go pound doors in New York, man. Like, sign up properties, take photos yourself. Literally signed up his first 10 customers. $20 billion business, $40 billion business, even more interesting. So number one reason companies die is not because they run out of money, it's because they can't sell a product. We're all aware of that. Like, if you raise $1 billion and you have nothing to sell, you are going to die, right? If you raise $10 million and you're doing $100 million in sales, you will never die. Congratulations, you built an amazing business that everyone wants. So please build that business. Don't just go out to fundraise to fundraise. I really like doing things that don't scale. I'm a huge fan of that. So, like, we get— I don't know if you guys get stuck in this predicament of, like, does it scale?
Like, will it ever scale? Does it work?
It's, like, one of my least favorite questions. Like, when any investor says that to you, or advisor, or friend, just, like, completely ignore it, please. Like, your businesses are too small not to do things that don't scale. My way of thinking about it is, if you did it and it doesn't work, it never mattered if it scaled. Right? If it didn't make your business better and didn't actually work, it would never have mattered. So just go do things that don't scale, and you'll find out how to scale them. Like you then you could bring on really smart people to help you scale.
