Do Things that Don't Scale (2013)

It's so hard to put your finger on why exactly this strategy is so important. To illustrate this, consider these two options:

1. Your business needs to accomplish X. X is a manual task right now. It could take you 80% of your available time, but you would learn the ins and outs of your business.

2. The alternative is to hire someone to do X. Perhaps you could even find someone who is a specialist at X and much better at it than you are. Or you could perhaps focus on postponing X until you've written enough code that you can automate it.

Prior to PG's essay, the logical thing would have been to recommend the second approach. But today, most HN readers would agree - myself included - that the first approach is the right one. The best explanation I can offer is that building a startup is invariably a learning process, and doing X yourself forces the founder(s) to go through that process early on when the course corrections are cheaper.

In my experience this is the single best essay on how to get to product/market fit as a startup. Short read, great examples, killer recommendations. I use it as the starter point for startups and innovation departments that I work with.

I am living through this right now and have asked this questions on several forums because when you're really in the midst of this hustle you start to question your priorities and constantly get this feeling about if there is a better way. This is a counter-intuitive advice on building a product and a company but the other option would be to get lucky.

Couple of more examples about doing things which don't scale:

Instacart manually built their product catalog for the first few million products.[0]

Pandora analyzing 10,000 songs manually for recommendation. [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/uV4lzz1Z0C8

[1] https://youtu.be/bTtq-M9iDHI

Having a small experience of this with a hobby project (an AI-powered chat bot). First versions, for each bot, I just cloned the repo and did a new deploy. That's finally become unworkable, so now I'm converting the project so that one server can handle many bots.

Getting to punt on all that overhead definitely helped the initial "launch", and IMO the code quality. It's proving incredibly easy to switch it over, and I think a lot of that is coming from how polished I was able to make the core of it.

Reminds me of Factorio: First you spaghetti (shitty probe project), then you mainbus (vertical scaling, haha), then you city block (horizontal scaling).

I like this essay. Another take on "do things that don't scale" is in the technical sense that, this is evidence you are actually solving a hard problem. If you limit yourself to only things where the tools to make it wildly successful at scale already exist then you're flattering yourself a lot to think nobody every thought of that before and the world is just waiting for you to create it. It is much more reassuring to know that there are hard real world reasons why this problem isn't solved yet and you will differentiate yourself by solving them because you actually have some unique advantage, knowledge etc.

I think the important thing highlighted in this article is that a startup needs to do whatever it can to survive - which means its okay to quickly do things that won't be sustainable later. A startup needs to hit the ground running, whether that means building a quick MVP or taking to the road for users. If it doesn't build a stable position to start off from or focuses too much on planning/scaling then it won't ever be able to move from square 1. When the startup gains traction and critical mass, then it can start thinking about scaling and long-term performance.

I wonder whether there are any examples not within the startup world but building your own personal “brand” (for want of another word), or competitive edge if that works better.

> "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.

This article just makes me miss the pre-pandemic times when touching someone else's laptop didn't feel like a huge health violation.

> things that don't scale

Some things that don't scale (i.e. super personal interactions) do have non-linear returns. An email blast can hit 1000 users. But talking to 10 people can generate recommendations. Which hold way more value than marketing emails.

I launched a product earlier this year and it has been much harder to get this level of personal interaction over email / digital platforms. It's a lot easier to ignore an email than someone in the same room.

Very excited to return to a world of human > human interactions.

The wisdom of the article aside, pg's web page seems ripe for a redesign...it's odd to see the line widths being so narrow in the era of wide HD monitors

I see a pattern:

- Someone writes an article with a catchy title.

- Someone [semi or quite] influential notices, and says: "Hey, let's write an article from the opposing perspective, to be contrarian, and see if we can also make some good points."

- Me: [Doesn't click and] thinks "Would ya look at that? An article/author which is contrarian probably just to be contratian. I'm gonna find something else to read..."