Early customer acquisition — Do things that don’t scale by Paul Graham
Recruit
- Recruit users manually first — perfect the product first before scaling
- Collision installation — don’t wait, setup for your customer to try it out
- Don’t underestimate the power of compound growth rate. Start small and measure growth rate weekly. If you start with 100 users and grow 10% weekly for 2 years, you will get to 2 millions later.
- Help existing users
Fragile
- It’s OK to get rejected by other people in the beginning. You can’t judge a baby that it will not accomplish anything.
- The question to ask about an early stage startup is not “is this company taking over the world?” but “how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?”
- Get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them
Delight
- Make your early user happy — they should feel that signing up is one of the best choices they ever made
- Don’t worry about scale in the beginning — make your customer happy first and you will find ways to scale
- Provide a service that no one else can
- Think of ways to delight your users
Experience
- Give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
- The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get.
Fire
- Focus on a deliberately narrow market — Facebook example
Consult
- Take over engagement to an extreme — pick a single user and build something for just that one user
Big
- Big launch doesn’t matter — Get some initial core of users. How well you’re doing a few months later will depend more on how happy you made those users than how many there were of them.
- 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.
- It’s not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You have to make an extraordinary effort initially. Any strategy that omits the effort — whether it’s expecting a big launch to get you users, or a big partner — is ipso facto suspect.
Vector
- Stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars — think of them as what you are going to build and the unscalable things you are going to do to get company going
- Recruit users manually and give them an overwhelmingly good experience — and the main benefit of treating startups as vectors will be to remind founders they need to work hard in two dimensions.
- 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.