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Do Things that Don't Scale

paulgraham.com

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Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#211

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

graeme wrote: post #48

I saw this on a miniature scale when I created a new subreddit ( http://reddit.com/r/LSAT ) I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links. Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the place became self-sus…

Interestingly from questions on their Meta sites StackExchange found that this sort of "priming the pump" didn't really work for them when it came to building on-line communities.

Their attitude (having tried it) is now if the community doesn't build itself it won't sustain itself. If you've got a working community then you can promote it but this sort of work won't work to build a community that's not already there.

Not saying that what PG says isn't true for start-ups which are obviously different, but it may be relevant in your case.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#212

Post by arkades »

jamesrcole wrote: post #166

Good article. One small thing that wasn't clear to me is The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get. When you're so big you have to resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users' homes and offices and watch them use your stuff like you did when there were only a handful of them. Why can't you do that once the company gets to a certain size?…

Sample error.

When you had 100 users, it was feasible to get detailed feedback on 90 out of 100 users. When you have 1.5m users, you cannot get detailed feedback on 1.35m users. Dealing with much smaller fractions of your user base, sampling error grows into larger and larger an issue. That's not to say there aren't wonderful statisticians working on sampling issues, but fundamentally it's not the same as actually interacting with the vast majority of your user base.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#213

Post by cm2012 »

pshin45 wrote: post #133

I find it fascinating that, with YC and HN, PG has essentially created a "business school for hackers" that is free, open to anyone, and makes it faster and easier for any hacker to gain a solid understanding of business and marketing principles. And yet on the flip side, I see no one in the MBA/business world who is effectively doing the opposite i.e. creating a forum and/or institution in the mold of YC/HN for "bus…

A lot of "business people" read HN.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#214

Post by damarquis »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #211
graeme wrote: post #48

I saw this on a miniature scale when I created a new subreddit ( http://reddit.com/r/LSAT ) I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links. Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the place became self-sus…

Interestingly from questions on their Meta sites StackExchange found that this sort of "priming the pump" didn't really work for them when it came to building on-line communities. Their attitude (having tried it) is now if the community doesn't build itself it won't sustain itself. If you've got a working community then you can promote it but this sort of work won't work to build a community that's not already there.…

I love some of the SO sites but they have a lot of communities that have been lingering in beta limbo for ages.

I would be interested in more detail on how they reached the conclusion that pump priming is not useful. Do you have a link?

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#215

Post by wslh »

gwu78 wrote: post #27

I like this essay a lot. In the early days of Apple, the founders placed minimum orders for parts on 30-day credit, then built the computers in 10 days and sold them before the payment for the parts came due. There wasn't any sexy software at that point. Apple was a hardware startup. Web startups are in general probably more attractive to VC, but I'm excited about hardware startups.

I am excited too but since it is a mass scale business I think it is important to focus on machines/robots to build the hardware.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#216

Post by zby »

vacri wrote: post #174
zby wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People would be calling us constantly". Would people call if they did not have a problem with your service? This is either very pessimistic or it means "lets kill the messenger".

Having worked in support for a long time, yes. If you set too low a bar on ease of access for support, people will call you for imagined problems that could have been sorted if they spent all of 5-10 seconds thinking about it. Support is expensive. It's certainly a necessity, unless you have unimaginable resources, but you need to temper access to it. This goes double if your target audience is the general public rat…

OK - it requires some balance - but what I have often seen is that what developers think are 'imagined problems' are nuisances that can be extinguished by spending all of 5-10 minutes thinking about it :)

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#218

Post by graeme »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #211
graeme wrote: post #48

I saw this on a miniature scale when I created a new subreddit ( http://reddit.com/r/LSAT ) I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links. Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the place became self-sus…

Interestingly from questions on their Meta sites StackExchange found that this sort of "priming the pump" didn't really work for them when it came to building on-line communities. Their attitude (having tried it) is now if the community doesn't build itself it won't sustain itself. If you've got a working community then you can promote it but this sort of work won't work to build a community that's not already there.…

That's an interesting result. Do you have a link where they explain how they came to their conclusion?

Because I did build a community entirely by priming the pump. There was no community there. So it absolutely worked in my case.

However, Reddit was an easy place to build a community, as I just had to tell existing Redditors who studied for the LSAT that there was now a subreddit for that. It was an easy sell.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#219

Post by wslh »

EGreg wrote: post #81

This is great advice. But I wanted to briefly mention an alternative perspective. We did things very differently. Now two years later we have 250,000 monthly users, and we're getting ready to roll out our technology to them in a few months. When you are building an app for people, businesses, or whoever, you have to go where they congregate. Pick an existing social network with a messaging channel that people haven't…

I remember the cofounder of Dropbox also talking about this in an Stanford video. He was talking about promoting it, with ads, in Reddit. I think this kind of advice is the one where we need to put more focus instead of dev issues.

Re: Do Things that Don't Scale

#220

Post by gwu78 »

wslh wrote: post #215
gwu78 wrote: post #27

I like this essay a lot. In the early days of Apple, the founders placed minimum orders for parts on 30-day credit, then built the computers in 10 days and sold them before the payment for the parts came due. There wasn't any sexy software at that point. Apple was a hardware startup. Web startups are in general probably more attractive to VC, but I'm excited about hardware startups.

I am excited too but since it is a mass scale business I think it is important to focus on machines/robots to build the hardware.

But at what stage do you adopt this focus? From Day 1? The point of the anecdote about Apple is that they began their startup by doing something unscalable. Not only was building computers by hand unscalable, but the financial risk they took was unreasonable. What if they failed to sell enough of their computers to cover the cost of the parts?

Many businesses that you see as "mass scale" may have began life as "small scale" ones. Check your assumptions.

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