Graham describes doing things by hand in a careful, artisanal way, even when that approach cannot support a giant company. He argues startups should do this early because skipping it may prevent them from growing at all, and the work teaches them a lot.
What does it mean to do things that don't scale?
Speaker
Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, explains why startups should do manual, painstaking work for early customers, in a Y Combinator talk.
Graham says he encountered startup lessons firsthand that Y Combinator later taught to founders. One is to handle tasks manually for early customers: getting those customers matters enough to justify the effort, and the work reveals what the startup can learn from serving them.
Takeaways
- Do labor-intensive work for early customers when it helps you learn what they need.
- Treat early customer acquisition as worth substantial manual effort.
- Use hands-on work to discover lessons before trying to scale.
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Y Combinator: Teaches startups common startup lessons“a lot of things you guys teach startups are things that I hit myself”
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