Do Things that don't Scale ;-)

Paul Graham:

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.
But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.
The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth. … And while 110 may not seem much better than 100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you'll be surprised how big the numbers get. After a year you'll have 14,000 users, and after 2 years you'll have 2 million.
Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them.
I often have to encourage founders who don't see the full potential of what they're building. Even Bill Gates made that mistake. He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting Microsoft. He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a fraction of the size it turned out to be.
Why is it counterintuitive for founders? Three reasons, I think.
One is that a lot of of startup founders are trained as engineers, and customer service is not part of the training of engineers. …
Another reason founders don't focus enough on individual customers is that they worry it won't scale. …
But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing how attentive they could be to their users is that they've never experienced such attention themselves. …
What novice founders don't get is what insanely great translates to in a larval startup. When Steve Jobs started using that phrase, Apple was already an established company. He meant the Mac (and its documentation and even packaging—such is the nature of obsession) should be insanely well designed and manufactured.
what insanely great morphs into as you roll the time slider back to the first couple months of a startup's life. It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For a big company it's necessarily the dominant one. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good.
In that form it only had a potential market of a few thousand people, but because they felt it was really for them, a critical mass of them signed up.
The Pebbles assembled the first several hundred watches themselves. If they hadn't gone through that phase, they probably wouldn't have sold $10 million worth of watches when they did go on Kickstarter.
Think of some successful startups. How many of their launches do you remember? All you need from a launch is some initial core of users.
But even if what you're building really is great, getting users will always be a gradual process—partly because great things are usually also novel, but mainly because users have other things to think about.
It's a common mistake among inexperienced founders to believe that a partnership with a big company will be their big break.
It's a common mistake among inexperienced founders to believe that a partnership with a big company will be their big break.
thinking of them (startups) as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.
the unscalable things you have to do to get started are not merely a necessary evil, but change the company permanently for the better.
if you have to work hard to delight users when you only have a handful of them, you'll keep doing it when you have a lot.