196. Startup Maxims: Do Things That Don't Scale Artwork

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196. Startup Maxims: Do Things That Don't Scale

March 08, 2024 • Rich Maloy • Season 4 • Episode 196

0:00 | 2:54

Text your thoughts directly to Rich.

This is probably my favorite startup maxim of all. It ties in with the Lean Startup Methodology, and is core to figuring out what you should be building and for whom.

Here is Paul Graham's original article: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

And maxim I quote, this one from Reid Hoffman: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/arent-any-typos-essay-we-launched-too-late-reid-hoffman/

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Rich 0:01

Do things that don't scale. This is another classic piece of startup advice. And like a lot of great startup maxims, its over a decade old. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, wrote this in July of 2013. And yes, a link in the show notes. This article is definitely worth a read. If you haven't read it ever, or even if you haven't read it in a while. He spends most of his time talking about doing things that don't scale as it relates to customer acquisition. Have a narrow market. Do manual installs with users. Work one-on-one with your customers. Do whatever you need to do to sit beside your customer and experience the product through their eyes, side-by-side with them. So much of building a startup is experimentation, getting that feedback so that you can experiment and build. If you think about the lean startup methodology, the essence is build, measure, learn. Eric Marcoullier talked about this in last week's episodes in two different ways. He talked about overbuilding as a number one killer of startups. If you built too much, you can't take it out to market. This ties in nicely with another startup maxim that I didn't cover this week, and that's the one from Reed Hoffman. If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." The second part of Eric's advice is around measure. If you have too many features, you can't measure, what's working and what's not working. Bringing this back to do things that don't scale. This is such a great piece of advice because when you're doing things that don't scale, you are hands-on with your users,. You are out doing the sales, you're out gathering information in the field. As you suck in all of that information, you can pour it into just a single direction for a single feature to solve that single problem that is the white hot center of your user's pain. Starting out, yes, you absolutely have to do things that don't scale. I think of all the startup maxims, this one holds its weight the best. That's all for this week as always, time is our most precious asset and I'm grateful you'd spend some of it with me today. And I'm grateful for AVL Growth Partners For supporting the VC minute. AVL's team brings significant years of finance and accounting expertise. They ensure your path to success is crystal clear. AVL starts with a comprehensive business evaluation, uncovering opportunities and mapping actions to both your short and longterm goals. Their evaluations are crafted from over a decade of experience pivoting companies from growth to scale. If you want to take your company to the next level and need the experience required to make it happen. Visit AVL growth.com right now.

Rich Maloy

Host