paulgraham.com, July 2013
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist.
Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the crank that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.
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.
Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition. The Collison brothers used to install Stripe for people on the spot. "Want to try our beta?" they would ask. And if the answer was yes, they would say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set it up for them then and there.
There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. The other is that the numbers are so small at the start. The big danger is not that some competitor will steal your idea, but that you'll get demoralized.
Startups are not won by having the best idea or the best technology. They are won by founders who are willing to do the manual, unglamorous, one-at-a-time work that gets the flywheel turning. Once it's spinning, you systematize. But you can't systematize something that hasn't started yet.
Your job as a founder is not to build a machine from day one. Your job is to manually produce the output the machine would eventually produce—and then, once you understand the process deeply from doing it by hand, build the machine.
This is why the best founders aren't just strategists—they're practitioners. They don't design processes from a whiteboard. They do the work, feel the friction, and then eliminate it one piece at a time.