Video · 26 min

YC's Group Partners Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale

Y Combinator Group Partners · Y Combinator Free Intermediate

YC partners who have watched thousands of founders unpack what the essay looks like in practice, with real examples from Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Algolia. You hear how far the best founders push manual work and, just as usefully, how they knew when it was time to stop. It turns the slogan into judgment you can apply to your own week.

  • The best founders do unscalable things far longer than feels comfortable.
  • Manual work is a listening device, you see problems no dashboard shows you.
  • You stop doing it by hand when the thing you learned is finally clear enough to encode.
Open on ycombinator.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. Isn't doing things that don't scale a waste of time, shouldn't I automate from day one?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. A short, practical field guide to customer discovery: who to talk to, how to find them, and how many. Pairs perfectly with The... talkingtohumans.com Book · ~80 pages (free PDF available) Talking to Humans Giff Constable
  3. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  4. The origin text for the modern MVP and validated-learning vocabulary every founder now uses. Read it for the mental model that... theleanstartup.com Book · ~330 pages The Lean Startup Eric Ries
  5. Altman's condensed operating manual for founders, including sharp guidance on focus, spending your time on what only you can... playbook.samaltman.com Article · long Startup Playbook Sam Altman
  6. Most first 100 users advice is vague. This piece is the opposite: it groups the real cold start tactics into seven concrete... Lenny's Newsletter Article · About a 15 minute read How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users Lenny Rachitsky
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →