Do Things that Don't Scale

I read this article 2 days ago in the night and that night I stayed awake all night. This is one killer article that made a lot of sense to me. As a freshly graduate engineer trying to startup, I am making the exact mistakes as mentioned in this article. I did try to automate tasks so that I can handle 1000's of users, when there is barely 2 people knocking at the door. What is even worse is that I do not even consider talking to these 2 people knocking on the door - I am an engineer, I am too busy trying to automate the process that I dont have the time to spend time with the customers, my code will. I cant believe how accurate the article is.

The reason for not talking to customers - I am hesitant - I am an engineer, I design stuff, I dont talk to people, that is not my job. I guess the problem and automate the system do that 100s of thousands of people can use it.

After reading the article, for the last 2 days I was very restless, maybe I still am. I was hesitant. But today I took the courage to take the product to the user and sat with him, showed the product and tried to solve just his problem, in a non scalable manner.

For those who might want to know exactly with respect what I am talking about. I launched a crowdfunding campaign for a hardware product - www.indiegogo.com/projects/tangle . The project is still live. The reason for doing the crowdfunding campaign was it because I was shy going around selling the product door to door. I did take feedback from friends but it I wanted to put it up on a platform and let things happen by itself. After launching the campaign, I realize how much people hustle to get the product to work on a crowdfunding campaign. Now I am taking the product offline and trying to sell it to customers directly.

This post is kickass... It just injected a lot of sense into me.

This is pg's best essay to date.