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- https://paulgraham.com/ds.html - startups take off because the founders make them take off. - The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. - There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing. - You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. - I was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention to users should be, and I realized Steve Jobs had already done it: insanely great. Steve wasn't just using "insanely" as a synonym for "very." He meant it more literally — that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological. - Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to **focus on a deliberately narrow market.** It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs. - Among companies, the best early adopters are usually other startups. They're more open to new things both by nature and because, having just been started, they haven't made all their choices yet. - Sometimes we advise founders of B2B startups to take over-engagement to an extreme, and to pick a single user and act as if they were consultants building something just for that one user. Consulting is the canonical example of work that doesn't scale. - When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later. - I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. - 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 a common mistake among inexperienced founders to believe that a partnership with a big company will be their big break. - And most importantly, 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. - It will also remind founders that an idea where the second component is empty — an idea where there is nothing you can do to get going, e.g. because you have no way to find users to recruit manually — is probably a bad idea, at least for those founders.