resurface.blog

One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist. [1]

Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.

Recruit

The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

Stripe is one of the most successful startups we’ve funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they’re famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition. [2]

What is the sales team responsible for?

Most would say closing deals. And they would be correct. That is the outcome they are held accountable to (and their compensation is tightly coupled to it).

But take a step back and you’ll see that sales is a research function [1]. They are literally talking to your ideal customers every day. They are getting more exposure to their lives and problems than any product manager or designer [2]. Ignoring those conversations because they are “just sales calls” is like ignoring technical engineering conversations because they are “just about code”. How it’s built and how it’s perceived is the product.

Similar to user research, you can’t take what you hear at face value. That’s why we’ve developed methods over the years to process raw information into insights [3]. With the advent of call recording tools, we can now build highly automated systems to handle a lot of the operational load. But we can’t stop there. We still need exposure to the raw goods.

Don’t get attached to what you built.

Get attached to what you’re trying to achieve.

If you anchor yourself to the objective instead of the implementation, you give yourself room to course-correct when reality pushes back. Early decisions are made with the least information. Treating them as sacred just makes learning more expensive.

Sunk cost is inevitable. Rigidity is optional.

When you fall in love with specific choices — the architecture, the tool, the approach — you’re forced to get everything right up front. That’s a high bar, and usually the wrong one. Progress comes from being willing to revise the how without losing sight of the why.