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Do Things that Don't Scale

paulgraham.com

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Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#181

Post by wozniacki »

aw3c2 wrote: post #167
wozniacki wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it a thought for a second. Does the degree of inconvenience caused to you - in requiring you to figure out what LSAT means - necessarily require that you record your disapproval here? The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information abou…

Sorry, it was meant as constructive criticism. I guess I should have made that clear. Writing it out might help unsuspecting people like me figure out what it is all about. I could also imagine it to be beneficial for search engines. My comment taught you that I had no idea what LSAT meant and that I thought it should be explained. Now look at yours for a moment.

I didn't mean to scapegoat you to highlight the existence of this widespread problem on HN:

People investing too little effort in figuring out elementary things and in the process adding to the clutter of posts that distract from the trunk of the conversation.

Someday in the not so future, perhaps all forum posts everywhere can be auto-condensed and auto-recomposed for the purposes of brevity and clarity.

Eg: The Natural Language Processing technology licensed from SRI International, that was at the core of Summly, the app Yahoo bought for $30 MM.

Until then, we could do what sensible HNers always did - resist adding anything that distracts or leads the conversation astray.

HN is hardly perfect.

People already bemoan, justifiably so, that not enough striking and incisive stories make it to the front page.

Despite efforts, there is plenty of voting-ring activity that bolts undeserving stories to the top.

The weighing of upvotes and downvotes (based on the standing of the HNer) could be better.

These are all known issues.

While these things are gradually improved, we could help by not adding to the tally with this kind of redundant clutter.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#183

Post by shin_lao »

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…

I think pg is saying that as long as you're not sure of what your product is doing and/or how much profitable it can be you should have a craftsman approach and once you get traction you go into the industrial/scaling phase.

If you try to scale/automate everything it's a recipe for a lot of wasted efforts. Make money first. Scale second.

In other words, scaling too early is premature optimization.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#184

Post by 6cxs2hd6 »

Jd wrote: post #24

TLDR: Startups that try to focus on big launches are generally lazy. Success comes from putting in extraordinary effort to putting your customer first. This means you get super-enthusiastic users. This works by the principle of compound growth as users tell their friends. Somewhat ironically I am of the opinion that: (A) this is one of pg's best and most useful essays ever (B) it is partially more useful because it i…

His essay nails it.

This is priceless advice. For free. If you could follow it without coaching hep, you wouldn't need YC (except maybe for the connections and networking).

The tricky part is that the wisdom is utterly simple. [1]

So if you say it concisely, it sounds like a fortune cookie. A lot of people won't believe it. They'll ignore it. Or they'll twist it into something unnecessarily complicated, and/or remap it into what they want to hear.

Maybe you could drop some Zen koan on their asses to stop them cold, a sort of mental slap to the face. Or more realistically, you could do what pg did -- write a somewhat long but clear essay. Hang enough flesh on the skeleton to get people to consider it.

- - -

[1] Simple is the sense of "not complicated". But not in the sense of "easy". It's hard work. On the other hand, it's gratifying work when you're getting feedback from real people and acting on it. Running that loop is energizing. But you need the energy because it's incessant.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#185

Post by guiambros »

klibertp wrote: post #104
guiambros wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an early employee at a startup, you were hired to make the company successful, not just to write code. If in order to succeed you need to clean the bathroom (figuratively speaking), just go do it. Go beyond the job description; it's a startup, after all. Job descriptions are worthless, until you have a decent size and need some bureaucracy to survive. If the founder is not seriously expecting you to do go…

No, he was hired to do the job his employer want's him to do. If the founder says "stop thinking about stupid/unnecessary/other's things/jobs/responsibilities" then he HAS to do just that. It's not his role to tell the founder how bad a management this is. And yes , I saw such founders in action, it does happen... Quite often in my experience, though obviously YMMV.

I have no doubt it does happen. I saw it myself several times. Heck, maybe I have done it, when I was a first time entrepreneur.

But as I said, if I were ever in this position, I'd just pack and go. It's hard to build a successful startup; even harder if the CEO thinks he/she has all the answers and is not open to collaboration and sharing the burden of the key early decisions.

This is particularly true when the company is small; not so much when you get to triple-digit headcounts.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#186

Post by slaxman »

sethbannon wrote: post #18

PG, can you give a couple examples of enterprise startups that took the "consulting" approach to establishing successful (largely productized) businesses?

37signals is one of them. They were in the software consulting business and built applications for in house use to manage their projects. They later realized that their clients need those applications as well.

I believe tumblr was a side project as well while the founder was consulting

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#188

Post by dominik »

Excellent essay. Good detail. I like the longer format.

Reminded me of, all people, Mother Teresa. She started in Calcutta in 1948. People mocked her: What difference do you think taking care of one poor person will make? But that was her focus: One person at a time. "Do small things with great love."

So too in the quite different field of technology startups.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#189

Post by pseut »

sriramk wrote: post #7

I can think of quite a few startups that used a big bang launch with press with success. Off the top of my head - Instagram (MG's series of pieces on Techcrunch), Mailbox, Flipboard, Square, Path. I get where PG is coming from but press can help bootstrap a network effect if you have none.

IIRC mailbox was a pivot from "orchestra todo," an iphone collaborative todo app that won awards on its own. You might want to check that your other "big bang launch" examples really fit that description.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#190

Post by graeme »

rahoulb wrote: post #175
gjm11 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the constructive-criticism version of your comment: "For the benefit of anyone like me who never heard of the LSAT before: it's the Law School Admission Test, a half-day test of reading comprehension, logic and verbal reasoning used by law schools in the US, Canada, and elsewhere." (More work? Maybe. But all the information there is also in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the LSAT, which you sa…

I disagree; the criticism isn't about the term itself, it's that the term isn't readily explained on the site. If, as explained, the term is widely understood by the target market, then this criticism is invalid (but caused by the poster not knowing the target market). If the criticism was valid, and the target market didn't understand the term, then the site owner knows that he/she should add an explanation. The act…

As the original author, I agree. The comment in question made me check the adwords keyword tool for the search volume of "Law School Admission Test"

It was, as I thought, fairly small relative to LSAT searches overall. But it's good to confirm that.

Also told me that there's enough searches to make a post along the lines of "What is the Law School Admission Test?" worthwhile, to catch students at the very start of their journey.

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