Advice 1. Do Things That Don’t Scale: 10 and 55 Keynotes

A summary of 10 key takeaways from the article “Do things that don’t scale” by Paul Graham from YC’s Essential Startup Advice.

Main post: 11 advices from YC — Condensed

Startups take off because the founders make them take off. It takes some sort of push to get them going.

1. Recruit (Users)

You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

• Don’t be Shy.
• Don’t be Lazy.
• You’ll get rejected. Get used to that.
• At least one founder will spend a lot of time on Sales and Marketing.
• If the market exists, start manually. Gradually switch to less manual.
• Don’t get discouraged by the small numbers at first.
• Don’t underestimate The Power of Compound Growth (See below).

2. Fragile

Don’t dismiss your startup

• Almost all startups are fragile initially.
• Inexperienced founders and investors unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones.
• Don’t dismiss your startup for the fragility. It’s harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong. It’s even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they’ll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you’ll dismiss your startup yourself.
• Ask the right question. Don’t ask “Is this company taking over the world?”. Ask “How big could this company get if the founders did the right things?” And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.

3. Delight

Acquire users, but also to make them happy.

• Rack your brains to think of new ways to delight them.
• First users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made.
• One advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can.
• Worried it won’t scale? You have nothing to lose.
• Existing conventions are not the upper bound on UX. Get Creative.

4. Experience

It’s not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user.

• How extreme your attention to users should be? Insanely Great.
• The product is just one component of that.
• Give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
• Over-engaging with early users. It’s a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good.
• The first thing you build is never quite right.
• Get something in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility, and then see what they do with it.
• Perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination, and in any case your initial model of users is always inaccurate, even if you’re one of them.

5. Fire

Keep the fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs: Focus on a deliberately narrow market.

• Ask if there’s a subset of the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly.
• Build something for themselves and their friends and only realize later that they could offer it to a broader market.
• Among companies, the best early adopters are usually other startups.

6. Meraki

Source good screws

• For hardware startups
• Fabricate things yourself.
• You can tweak the design faster when you’re the factory, and you learn things you’d never have known otherwise.

7. Consult

Take over-engagement to an extreme.

• [Consulting] It’s safe to do it so long as you’re not being paid to.
• Pick a single user and act as if they were consultants building something just for that one user.
• The initial user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly, and you’ll usually find you’ve made something other users want too.
• Find just one user who really needs something and can act on that need.
• Use your software yourselves on their behalf if you need to.

8. Manual

Get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later. This lets you launch faster,

• You don’t just use your software, but are your software.
• You’ll know exactly what to build because you’ll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.
• If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks.
• Less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn’t yet solve anyone’s problems.

9. Big

[Big] Launches matter little.

• The “Big Launch” is the initial tactic that usually doesn’t work.
• Why do founders think launches matter? A combination of solipsism and laziness. They think what they’re building is so great that everyone who hears about it will immediately sign up.
• Some want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, with embargoes. And on a Tuesday, of course, since they read somewhere that’s the optimum day to launch something.
• Broadcasting your existence would be so much less work to get users rather than recruiting them one at a time. </sarcasm>
• Getting users will always be a gradual process even if what you’re building really is great.
• Users have other things to think about.
• Partnerships too usually don’t work. They don’t work for startups in general, but they especially don’t work as a way to get growth started.

10. Vector

Think of startups ideas as: 1. Pairs of what you’re going to build, plus 2. The Unscalable thing(s) you’re going to do initially to get the company going.

• If you have to be aggressive about user acquisition when you’re small, you’ll probably still be aggressive when you’re big.
• If you have to work hard to delight users when you only have a handful of them, you’ll keep doing it when you have a lot.
• No, you can’t avoid doing sales by hiring someone to do it for you. You have to do sales yourself initially.
• Embrace the fact that you’re small and use whatever advantages that brings.
• If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and those that will pay the most, it’s usually best to pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters.
• If you have no way to find users to recruit manually, it is probably a bad idea, at least for those founders.

Extra notes

How to get users?

• Build something to solve your own problems, then you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward.
• Run a comparatively untargeted launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them.

The Power of Compound Growth

• 100 Users. + 10% Growth next week = 110 Users.
• 1 year later = 14, 000 users.
• 2 years later = 2 million.

It’s not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You have to make an extraordinary effort initially.