Summary of Paul Graham’s article ‘Do things that don’t scale’

Of all the advises for start-ups, the best advice on the internet I read was Paul Graham’s article on ‘Do things that don’t scale’. This post is to summarise my understanding of the article.

(1) Recruit users manually: Every startup must by its own, manually find users. It might sound uncool to approach people and ask them to use/buy or product at the beginning, but that’s how a lot of startups really did to attract and retain their users. As many startups are mostly set up by engineers who either is not trained how to go out and recruit their users or are simply lazy to do so. But he advises that at least one founder to go out and do the marketing of their offerings

(2) Understand it’s fragile: He emphasizes that a startup must understand that they are fragile and can break at any point. They must question on ‘Is this company taking over the world?” but “how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?’

(3) Delight: One of the important things to do is to delight the users. The biggest advantage a startup has is to create user experiences in a way it likes and delights the user to retain which big firms don’t have.

(4) Focus on narrow markets: He refers to Facebook, which was only at Harvard until it obtained critical mass there. Then it spread to other Ivy League schools. Finally, it opened up to other colleges which already had built up demand. “It’s like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs,” Graham says. If you’re a hardware startup though, Graham recommends trying to scale via pre-orders or crowdfunding, like Pebble did on Kickstarter.

(5) Focus on making your product perfect for one user: This could eventually create a product many of their peers also love

(6) Wait till launching it big: launch it to users cautiously rather than launching it all at once and in a large way. He cautions startups to stay away from partnerships with big companies at first. As this could seem like a shortcut to on boarding users

Paul Graham ends the article beautifully by stressing on the point that just doing something extraordinary in the beginning is not enough. One must put extraordinary effort initially.