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The greatest irony is that the founders love to preach "Do things that don't scale". Nothing scales worse then working through legislation with cities around th

by abannin 11y ago

The greatest irony is that the founders love to preach "Do things that don't scale". Nothing scales worse then working through legislation with cities around the world, so this should be top priority for them, right?

leereeves 11y ago
That's advice for helping newborn startups grow, not for designing late-stage business models.
- abannin 11y ago
  Not sure if this statement is sarcastic or not, I could read it either way. So I'm going to respond as if it's not a joke. The heart of the advice is to start solving problems that are hard to solve, and worry about scalability and efficiency after you've proven there is a demand. Often you will find creative ways to gain efficiency, build the infrastructure, and then have a wonderful competitive moat for the business. The big exception is customer service, there is no replacing being able to talk to a helpful person within 60 seconds of encountering a problem, but it's much more expensive to parallelize people then software. In the case of legislation, getting on offense and working with a few cities will go a long way for establishing a precedent that other cities will follow. Uber was rather effective in this area.
  - leereeves 11y ago
    I meant it seriously, based on PG's essay. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html 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. The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. For as long as they could (which turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. [Meraki] got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves. When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later.

by abannin 11y ago

leereeves 11y ago

That's advice for helping newborn startups grow, not for designing late-stage business models.

abannin 11y ago
Not sure if this statement is sarcastic or not, I could read it either way. So I'm going to respond as if it's not a joke. The heart of the advice is to start solving problems that are hard to solve, and worry about scalability and efficiency after you've proven there is a demand. Often you will find creative ways to gain efficiency, build the infrastructure, and then have a wonderful competitive moat for the business. The big exception is customer service, there is no replacing being able to talk to a helpful person within 60 seconds of encountering a problem, but it's much more expensive to parallelize people then software. In the case of legislation, getting on offense and working with a few cities will go a long way for establishing a precedent that other cities will follow. Uber was rather effective in this area.
- leereeves 11y ago
  I meant it seriously, based on PG's essay. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html 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. The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. For as long as they could (which turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. [Meraki] got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves. When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later.