One of the things I tell founders most often is counterintuitive enough that they resist it at first. Do the thing that doesn’t scale.
A lot of founders believe there is a threshold moment when a startup just goes. You build something, you make it available, and if it is good, people find it. If it doesn’t take off on its own, the market must not exist.
That is the wrong mental model. Almost every startup you can think of that now seems like an unstoppable machine was once being pushed uphill by hand. The founders made it take off. There is no other way.
The manual phase is not embarrassing. It is necessary.
The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is recruit users one at a time. Not launch. Not broadcast. Recruit.
Stripe is one of the most successful companies I have ever seen, and they are famous for this. When someone agreed to try their product, they did not say “great, we will send you a link.” They said “hand me your laptop.” They set the user up on the spot before the meeting ended. Founders who are more diffident wait. The Collison brothers were not going to wait.
Airbnb went door to door in New York. Literally. They knocked on hosts’ doors, recruited new ones, and helped existing ones improve their listings. When they showed up to weekly dinners they always just flew back from somewhere.
At the time, neither of these felt like strategy. It felt like survival. But that survival phase is where the company’s culture and momentum get permanently installed. The habit of aggressive, personal user acquisition does not disappear when the company gets big. It compounds.
For your first ten customers, you almost certainly need to do something similar. Not a launch. Not a PR push. Show up. Sit with them. Get them set up yourself if you have to.
Being small is the advantage you are not using
Founders who have worked at big companies try to imitate big companies. They think that looks professional. They stay at arm’s length from users, respond to support tickets in batches, and build self-serve onboarding.
But they are throwing away the one thing they have that no large company can replicate: the ability to be genuinely, almost obsessively attentive to individual people.
Tim Cook cannot send every customer a handwritten note. You can. He cannot personally investigate why a specific user churned last week. You can. The advantage of being small is not just that you can move fast. It is that you can care about individuals in a way that scales terribly and matters enormously.
Wufoo sent handwritten thank you notes to every new user for longer than anyone would expect. That seems embarrassing if you are trying to look like a serious company. But it is not embarrassing. It is the feedback loop. It is how you find out what to build next.
I have never once seen a startup damaged by trying too hard to make its early users happy.
The product is not the experience
The thing I find hardest to get founders to understand is this: for an early-stage company, insanely great does not mean an insanely great product. It means an insanely great experience of being your user.
Those are different things. At scale, the product is nearly the whole experience, because you cannot supplement it with personal attention. But when you have fifty users, the product can be rough, incomplete, even a little buggy, as long as the surrounding experience is extraordinary. You can make up the difference with attentiveness.
The feedback you get from your first few dozen users, when you are watching them use your product in real time, is better than any feedback you will ever get again. When you are big enough to need focus groups, you will wish you were still small enough to watch over someone’s shoulder.
The narrow wedge is not a limitation
Sometimes the right move is to start with a deliberately narrow slice of the market. Not because it is all you can capture, but because capturing it completely gives you something a broad, shallow approach never can: a group of users who feel the product was built for them.
Facebook started as a tool for Harvard students. That is a potential market of a few thousand people. But because it was really for them, a critical mass signed up, and that momentum made everything else possible. After Facebook stopped being just for Harvard it remained for specific colleges for quite a while. Mark Zuckerberg said that creating course lists for each school was a lot of work, but it made students feel the site was their natural home.
If you are building something and you find yourself asking “how do we reach everyone?”, it is usually the wrong question. The better question is: is there a subset of people for whom we could be the obvious, indispensable thing? Start there. Get it really hot before adding more logs.
What you are actually avoiding
Founders avoid this work for two reasons. The first is shyness. It is uncomfortable to recruit users individually, to be rejected, to do things that feel small.
The second is the numbers. Ten users feels too small to matter. But ten users growing at 10% a week compounds to fourteen thousand in a year. The number you start with matters far less than the rate at which it grows.
The unscalable thing you are avoiding is usually the thing that would actually start the engine. Not a launch. Not a partnership. Not a campaign.
Go get one user. Get them set up yourself. Make them happy in a way that does not scale.
Then do it again.