What does the Scotty vs. Kirk comment imply? I don't watch much TV and I'm not a native speaker so I don't get it.
Do Things that Don't Scale
151–160 of 223 posts
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats a great way to practice user acquisition.
For anyone interested in using a subreddit to practice acquiring users: Metareddit lets you track all mentions of keywords or phrases across Reddit. It let me find literally everyone who commented about the LSAT. http://metareddit.com
Fantastic marketing tool.
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
38.
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#154Whoa....this footnote flies in the face of the 'charge early' crowd:
[8] If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and those that will pay the most, it's usually best to pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters. They'll have a better influence on your product, and they won't make you expend as much effort on sales. And though they have less money, you don't need that much to maintain your target growth rate early on.
Very interesting perspective.
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#155Whoa....this footnote flies in the face of the 'charge early' crowd: [8] If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and those that will pay the most, it's usually best to pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters. They'll have a better influence on your product, and they won't make you expend as much effort on sales. And though they have less money, you don't need that mu…
Note that is probably written for the Startup goes VC route. It may be different for the Bootstrappers.
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#156What does the Scotty vs. Kirk comment imply? I don't watch much TV and I'm not a native speaker so I don't get it.
Scotty was in charge of the engines that made the ship go. Kirk was in charge of the ship, the mission, and interacting with whatever weird things they ran into.
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#157This 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 m…
Non-technical people don't know what normal is in your process, what should be noted when it's happening (Warning's may actually be important if non-fatal) and when they should seek advice. They're liable to ask you about every tiny thing, but then miss something really important altogether. Basically - I strongly disagree that you can often put a non-technical person onto a repetitive task involving technology.
It really depends what process you're talking about, but its a worthwhile consideration that unskilled (but intelligent) labor is not cheap either (i.e. Foxconn has to be massive and in another country to leverage it the way they do).
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#158You 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 sporad…
Tech support is a skill in itself, but it's also a crucial feedback channel for learning how users use your software. Empathy with users is what lets you distinguish a good programming decision from a bad programming decision when it comes to the software. Distinguishing good programming decisions from bad ones is what programmers do all day.
It's possible for tech support to work out as a disruptive distraction, but it doesn't always have to be that way. And yes, there are programming things where being in the zone is crucial, but there are usually programming things where it isn't, too.
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#159Instead 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.
This is probably the most important thing a new entrepreneur needs to realize. Envisioning a world where everybody is using your product isn't enough. You need to figure out how to get to that world from this one, and that is where many entrepreneurs don't have a strategy, and subsequently fail.
Re: Do Things that Don't Scale
#160It's interesting that what pg writes in this essay is implicit in the word scale . If you think about what it means to scale, it means your level of automation grows as your number of users grows. If you don't have many users, it doesn't make sense to automate too much.
It's not about whether it makes sense to automate or not... it is about how vital for a young startup it is to do things that a big company wouldn't do (hence cannot scale) to make the client feel special: e.g. sending the client a hand-written note from the CEO. The article is really great and I think it really makes the point that such seemingly unnecessary actions can make the difference.
Great read!