(highlight:: 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.
[1]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.)
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(highlight:: 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.)
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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.
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- sales, marketing,

(highlight:: if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users
manually and then gradually switch to less manual methods.)
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(highlight:: How do you find users to recruit manually? If you build something
to solve your own problems, then
you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward.)
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(highlight:: Otherwise you'll have to make a more deliberate effort to locate
the most promising vein of users. The usual way to do that is to
get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted
launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and
seek out more like them. For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that
a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design,
so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and
that worked well.)
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(highlight:: Your first users should feel that
signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made.
And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways
to delight them.)
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(highlight:: 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. Their standards for customer service have been set by the companies they've been customers of, which are mostly big ones. Tim Cook doesn't send you a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. He can't. But you can. That's one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can.)
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- [note::How far could we, as the customer success team, could we go to absolutely delight our customers?]

(highlight:: I was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention
to users should be, and I realized Steve Jobs had already done it:
insanely great. Steve wasn't just using "insanely" as a synonym
for "very." He meant it more literally — that one should focus
on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be
considered pathological.)
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(highlight:: 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.)
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In software, especially, it usually works best to get something in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility, and then see what they do with it. Perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination, and in any case your initial model of users is always inaccurate, even if you're one of them.
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(highlight:: The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users
will be the best you ever get. When you're so big you have to
resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users'
homes and offices and watch them use your stuff like you did when
there were only a handful of them.)
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(highlight:: Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately
narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get
it really hot before adding more logs.)
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(highlight:: Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating
things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups.
You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you
learn things you'd never have known otherwise.)
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(highlight:: Consulting is the canonical example of work that doesn't scale.
But (like other ways of bestowing one's favors liberally) it's safe
to do it so long as you're not being paid to. That's where companies
cross the line. So long as you're a product company that's merely
being extra attentive to a customer, they're very grateful even if
you don't solve all their problems. But when they start paying you
specifically for that attentiveness — when they start paying
you by the hour — they expect you to do everything.)
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(highlight:: If you can find
someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it
manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then
gradually automate the bottlenecks.)
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(highlight:: I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't
work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who seem to
believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and
that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with
sufficient initial velocity.)
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solipsism
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(highlight:: 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.)
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(highlight:: It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You
have to make an extraordinary effort initially. Any strategy
that omits the effort — whether it's expecting a big launch to
get you users, or a big partner — is ipso facto suspect.)
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it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them 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.
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- growth, business, startups, scaling,