The Startup Life · Track 1
Do Things That Don't Scale
Indie Folk · For founders who remember knocking on doors
Lenny Rachitsky · How to kickstart and scale a consumer business — Step 4: Find your early adopters by doing things that don't scale
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“The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is recruit users manually.”- Paul Graham
The Story Behind This Song
Paul Graham coined the concept in his famous essay, and Brian Chesky became the poster child — flying to New York in 2009, personally photographing Airbnb listings with a rented camera because hosts' blurry phone photos weren't converting. The Collison brothers at Stripe would literally grab people's laptops and install Stripe for them on the spot. DoorDash's Tony Xu started by taping $6 flyers to dorm room doors at Stanford. Every one of these billion-dollar companies started with founders doing the most unscalable thing imaginable, and that's exactly what made them work.
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Based on
How to kickstart and scale a consumer business — Step 4: Find your early adopters by doing things that don't scale
Lenny RachitskyNewsletter
Do Things That Don't Scale (paulgraham.com)
Paul GrahamNewsletter
Brian Chesky's contrarian approach to building Airbnb
Brian CheskyPodcast
