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If you hadn't read yet, read the original Paul Graham essay on this: http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html The idea is part you m
by soneca 12y ago
If you hadn't read yet, read the original Paul Graham essay on this: http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html
The idea is part you must do whatever it takes to have your first users/clients and keep growing from there (as the guy from Teespring says) and part is that you must first know what to scale.
Sure, startup = growth, no one starts a startup without imagining it will grow a lot. But that is why this advice is particular powerful, because, as PG says for a lot of things on startups, it is counter-intuitive.
So the advice is more about doing things that don't scale until you actually reach product/market fit (which means "Make sure your retention flat lines at the appropriate level.", as said by Alex Schultz in his lecture); you should do things that don't scale.
But, sure, when you focus in big growth and scale, yes, then you start scaling stuff.
PS: I really sound like the ass-kissing student on your class who repeats everything teachers said before to look good. But I really think al of it makes sense.
- graycat 12y agoHere's an analogy: Have some URLs of some Web pages and want to extract the links from those pages? Okay, first do it by hand! So, have a Web browser save the HTML and CSS, JS, files. Then use a good editor to look at the HTML and see how to parse the thing and extract the links. Write some code to do this and try on some more of the URLs. When see are not parsing the files just right, tweak the code. Finally, get some okay code and get and parse all the HTML files from all the URLs with the code -- scalable! So, start by hand and see how to automate the work and then have a scalable solution. I just did that for a collection of about 5000 URLs!