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Do Things that Don't Scale

paulgraham.com

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Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#141

Post by seanmcdirmid »

DanielRibeiro wrote: post #52
guynamedloren wrote: post #46

This bums me out. Majorly. I work at a YC startup (which will remain nameless), and we function exactly the opposite of how this essay suggests. We aren't huge by any means, but we focus heavily on scale, and suppress ideas that do not scale. Automate everything. Nothing should be manual . I'm an engineer, but I recognize the importance of fantastic customer service. While building an iPhone app, I suggested that use…

we function exactly the opposite of how this essay suggests Not sure if that is the case, but pg wrote last year[1]: A YC partner wrote: My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with th…

I.e. confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance?

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#143

Post by Spooky23 »

guynamedloren wrote: post #46

This bums me out. Majorly. I work at a YC startup (which will remain nameless), and we function exactly the opposite of how this essay suggests. We aren't huge by any means, but we focus heavily on scale, and suppress ideas that do not scale. Automate everything. Nothing should be manual . I'm an engineer, but I recognize the importance of fantastic customer service. While building an iPhone app, I suggested that use…

Dogma can be a real bitch. I always tell people working for me to keep the religion at church and get something done.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#144

Post by gruseom »

dschiptsov wrote: post #132

One more important thing to understand about Jobs "miracle" is that he was allowed to do what he was obsessed with. No idiotic "manager" or board member intervene with ideas of "cutting costs" on packaging or materials or any other fast-food technologies to reduce the product to the mix of cheapest and crapest ingredients imaginable. No idiots insisted that it is much more "effective" to just add a "theme" to and old…

Fred Wilson said something similar about obsession, though in very different language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2721767. I like that quote very much.

What (if anything) are you obsessed with?

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#145

Post by redguava »

ggreer wrote: post #59

You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. I'd like to elaborate on this point, because it's probably the most valuable thing I learned while working at Cloudkick. Similar to how every Marine is a rifleman, I think every developer should be tech support[1]. It's an incredibly easy way to please users. Many customers don't realize how small your company is. They expe…

I disagree with having developers do tech support. In fact I think it's insulting to those that are great at tech support. Tech support is a skill in itself, not just a place to let developers play.

If you really care about support, you'll have people with that expertise doing it.

Also, developing is really something where being in the zone gets the most productivity, and support is usually an intermittent and sporadic distraction, it can be a real productivity killer.

I see why people say this in pricinple, I just don't think it's a good idea in practice.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#146

Post by Spooky23 »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #123

Loved this essay, but I'm a little confused by this footnote. "[5] If you're building something for which you can't easily get a small set of users to observe—e.g. enterprise software—and in a domain where you have no connections, you'll have to rely on cold calls and introductions. But should you even be working on such an idea?" When pg says, "Should you even be working on such an idea?" -- is he saying that he que…

You need to understand the secret handshakes and domain trivia in a particular enterprise space to be successful.

I have worked in government IT for years. When some breathless sales dude tells me that he has some sort of amazing solution for X that allowed Goldman Sachs to cure the common cold, I'm intrigued. When the sales dude doesn't know what a government procurement contract is, I just shake my head, because we probably wasted an hour or more talking about it. Worst case scenario, the sales dude captures the imagination of some big shot and gets fired because instead of selling stuff, he wasted 6 months filling out forms and missed his quota.

The guys who sell to my vertical already know how I'm going to buy the product, and sell to the attributes of the product that matter to us.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#147

Post by po »

guynamedloren wrote: post #46

This bums me out. Majorly. I work at a YC startup (which will remain nameless), and we function exactly the opposite of how this essay suggests. We aren't huge by any means, but we focus heavily on scale, and suppress ideas that do not scale. Automate everything. Nothing should be manual . I'm an engineer, but I recognize the importance of fantastic customer service. While building an iPhone app, I suggested that use…

Automate everything. Nothing should be manual.

If you can even get close to doing that then you either have the world's best development team or you aren't trying to do enough. In a perfect world we would have time to automate everything, but time pressure makes us go for the minimal thing that will work.

A large part of this is essay is premised on the idea that developer time is expensive and slow relative to the manual process (which can even be done by someone non-technical in a pinch). If you're not 100% sure it's a necessary feature then it is a waste. In your case, throwing a phone number on the page was a very quick way to provide good support relative to an automated support system and/or a flawless well-tuned experience.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#148

Post by graeme »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #140
graeme wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah. Everyone in the target market knows what it is, otherwise it's pretty obscure. It's a logic test required for admission to law school in North America, highly competitive.

Most Americans with college degrees have heard of it, even if we never go near law school. Same for the GMAT and MCAT.

How old are you? I'm 27. I find everyone in my target market (23 and under) knows about it, people my age don't always know about it, and people older than me often don't know about it.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#149

Post by sambe »

I think a key thing here is "plan to systematically do something that doesn't scale if the rewards are big enough". And the common bias is thinking that the rewards are not as big as they are. If it's in your top 3 problems and manual work is a path to scaling automatically, you should probably do it.

However, at some point short-term velocity is also contributing speed bumps that are barriers for reaching the next level. I certainly wouldn't want to be doing this ad-hoc or without consideration.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#150

Post by hkmurakami »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #140
graeme wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah. Everyone in the target market knows what it is, otherwise it's pretty obscure. It's a logic test required for admission to law school in North America, highly competitive.

Most Americans with college degrees have heard of it, even if we never go near law school. Same for the GMAT and MCAT.

for those of us who aren't familiar, GMAT is for business school and MCAT is for medical school.
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