191–200 of 223 posts
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.
However, Teresa and those like her are a total fraud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably it is that very Russian obsession with the naive notion that most things in the world are "not right".)
>naive notion But aren't they?
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…
Earlier 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
I'd love any feedback.
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
I would also be interested of examples
I'd be curious to know good ways to balance these various things that don't scale. I speak from a position of inexperience, but I can't imagine a fragile startup could possibly max out any of them. Given that, what are some heuristics for allocating focus across several unscalable efforts? Put another way, what are cues to focus more on one thing than another?
See the section labelled "Compass" here: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Earlier 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.
Earlier 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.
Totally agree. It's been discussed on HN before, but here's another concrete example of this sort of thinking: killing the no-reply address. IMHO, there is no reason your startup should use no-reply for any emails, ever. Yes, it's a hassle to sort through all the out of office replies, but it's worth it. Even if you tell people not to, they will reply to your newsletter or order confirmation or forgotten password mes…