Paul Graham's advice that early-stage founders should do things by hand that they'll later automate — and why 'unscalable' is often the right choice in the beginning.
“Counterintuitive but true. The most successful startups I've seen all had a phase where the founders were doing the work manually. This essay explains why.”
3 comments
Join OpenLinq to join the discussion
AirBnB photographing apartments themselves is the example I use. The question isn't 'does it scale?' — it's 'does it work?'
This is why I keep saying - build compliance in from day one, not as an afterthought.
Stripe's early days are another perfect example. The Collisons would literally walk over to your laptop and set up the integration for you. Nobody does that at scale. But doing it then built trust that scaled.