[HN Gopher] Do Things that Don't Scale (2013)
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Do Things that Don't Scale (2013)
Author : ollerac
Score : 117 points
Date : 2021-02-10 06:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.paulgraham.com)
| JIBitator wrote:
| Seen that here before
| themanmaran wrote:
| > "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.
|
| This article just makes me miss the pre-pandemic times when
| touching someone else's laptop didn't feel like a huge health
| violation.
|
| > things that don't scale
|
| Some things that don't scale (i.e. super personal interactions)
| do have non-linear returns. An email blast can hit 1000 users.
| But talking to 10 people can generate recommendations. Which hold
| way more value than marketing emails.
|
| I launched a product earlier this year and it has been much
| harder to get this level of personal interaction over email /
| digital platforms. It's a lot easier to ignore an email than
| someone in the same room.
|
| Very excited to return to a world of human > human interactions.
| codegeek wrote:
| Nothing beats human to human in person interaction, nothing.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| There are things that don't scale that you can still do its
| more given as an example.
|
| Like for instance Groupon was prototyped in Wordpress. I
| believe Mailchimp would send their customers actual physical
| letters. Stripe would send you card readers for free.
|
| It is better to validate the idea before writing a line of code
| if you can do it.
| dhruvparamhans wrote:
| I wonder whether there are any examples not within the startup
| world but building your own personal "brand" (for want of another
| word), or competitive edge if that works better.
| tarunkotia wrote:
| I am living through this right now and have asked this questions
| on several forums because when you're really in the midst of this
| hustle you start to question your priorities and constantly get
| this feeling about if there is a better way. This is a counter-
| intuitive advice on building a product and a company but the
| other option would be to get lucky.
|
| Couple of more examples about doing things which don't scale:
|
| Instacart manually built their product catalog for the first few
| million products.[0]
|
| Pandora analyzing 10,000 songs manually for recommendation. [1]
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/uV4lzz1Z0C8
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/bTtq-M9iDHI
| naeemtee wrote:
| One thing that isn't captured nowadays is that a lot of what
| "couldn't scale" before - i.e manual work, the type of which
| you described - is now much more scalable due to how much
| easier it is to automate tasks at scale.
|
| It's suddenly feasible to build businesses that require at-
| scale manual operations, because you can do so in a
| predictable, revenue-positive way.
| tarunkotia wrote:
| "Do Things That Don't Scale" is not a choice which founders
| make even if they have all the resources and technical chops.
| If you don't know or unsure what to focus on then how do you
| decide to optimize and improve it?
|
| Take Instacart for example, what would you have done
| differently to build the catalog given you had same
| information what Apoorva had at that time? Same for Pandora &
| Airbnb...
| RangerScience wrote:
| Having a small experience of this with a hobby project (an AI-
| powered chat bot). First versions, for each bot, I just cloned
| the repo and did a new deploy. That's finally become unworkable,
| so now I'm converting the project so that one server can handle
| many bots.
|
| Getting to punt on all _that_ overhead definitely helped the
| initial "launch", and IMO the code quality. It's proving
| incredibly easy to switch it over, and I think a lot of that is
| coming from how polished I was able to make the core of it.
|
| Reminds me of Factorio: First you spaghetti (shitty probe
| project), then you mainbus (vertical scaling, haha), then you
| city block (horizontal scaling).
| cunninghamd wrote:
| So... while I respect avoiding shameless self-promotion,
| referencing your hobby project, or at least including it in
| your "About" info would be cool, for those interested. :)
| aeoleonn wrote:
| I see a pattern:
|
| - Someone writes an article with a catchy title.
|
| - Someone [semi or quite] influential notices, and says: "Hey,
| let's write an article from the opposing perspective, to be
| contrarian, and see if we can also make some good points."
|
| - Me: [Doesn't click and] thinks "Would ya look at that? An
| article/author which is contrarian probably just to be
| contratian. I'm gonna find something else to read..."
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Even so, intentionally trying to be being a contrarian is a
| good way for industry to avoid groupthink and cargo culting.
| It's really valuable. I'm sure somebody will write an article
| called "Do Things That Scale" soon.
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| I think you might have been downvoted since Paul Graham is not
| ordinary folk writing clickbaity titles here. He indirectly
| founded the website you're commenting on so your comment might
| have been received as bashing on him.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| This is most likely why GP was downvoted:
|
| > - Me: [Doesn't click and] thinks "Would ya look at that? An
| article/author which is contrarian probably just to be
| contratian. I'm gonna find something else to read..."
|
| Low-value post that seems to be deliberately avoiding real
| contribution and participation in the conversation while
| simultaneously admitting that they didn't read and (almost
| certainly) won't read the article. There's no point to these
| kinds of comments, and they should be downvoted.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| He is "ordinary folk writing clickbaity titles". People here
| just pay too much attention.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| So PHD in computer science, wrote programming books still
| recommended by very smart people 30 years after the fact,
| launched, ran and sold successful startup, and now
| successful VC is... ordinary? People like Peter Norvig say
| "On Lisp" is one of the best books on lisp! I'm in the
| software acquisition business, so I talk to founders
| getting ready to exit every month. That set of combined
| successes is most emphatically not ordinary.
| julianpye wrote:
| In my experience this is the single best essay on how to get to
| product/market fit as a startup. Short read, great examples,
| killer recommendations. I use it as the starter point for
| startups and innovation departments that I work with.
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