Essay · ~15 min read

Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham · paulgraham.com Free Beginner

The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few customers. The cheapest, most honest way to validate demand is to go get it one person at a time.

  • Recruit your first users manually, don't wait for them to come.
  • A tiny group of users who love you beats a big group who like you.
  • Manual, unscalable effort early is a feature, not a failure.
Open on paulgraham.com ↗

It answers 122 questions

  1. How do I talk to customers without them just telling me what I want to hear?
  2. What actually counts as an MVP, and what's the smallest one I can get away with?
  3. Which no-code tool should I use to build my first product?
  4. How do I decide what to build next?
  5. How do I actually get my first 10 customers when nobody has heard of me?
  6. I'm a technical founder and I hate selling, do I really have to do sales myself?
  7. How do I write a cold email that people actually reply to?
  8. How do I decide which features to cut from v1?
  9. Can I really build a serious business on no-code, or will I hit a wall?
  10. How often should an early-stage startup ship?
  11. Isn't doing things that don't scale a waste of time, shouldn't I automate from day one?
  12. My launch flopped and nobody cared, did I mess it up?

And 110 more across the hub.

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  2. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  3. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  4. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
  5. An Indian founder story where the early demand test was manual, cold emails and direct outreach to find the first customers... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~50 min How Khadim Batti Built Whatfix Into a Global SaaS Leader Prime Venture Partners
  6. A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to win your first 10 B2B customers Lenny Rachitsky
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