This week 2 Companies got listed, Doordash (DASH) on NYSE and Airbnb (ABNB) on NASDAQ. As I was browsing through my Twitter feed, I found this thread by the Founder of Doordash, Evan Charles Moore.
The thread gave me insight into the minds of the founders of Doordash. With a formidable competition in Grubhub and Ubereats, I was amazed to learn the techniques they used to outdo the competition.
One of the things that Moore mentioned was “Doing Things That Dont Scale” which they learned at YCombinator. Unable to understand what this was all about I went to Paul Grahams (@paulg) of YCombinator who had a whole essay on this concept. You can find it here.
Although Paul has written a wonderful essay, I felt compelled to take points and present it here. I must explicitly mention here that if you are looking at a summary of Paul Grahams article on “Doing Things that Dont Scale” then this post might come hand.
What?
So what is actually “Doing Things that Dont Scale”? A Startup, at the nascent stage, must take actions which will help the company in the long run. These actions might not be pleasant, in fact downright difficult to pursue, but if done with a heart and good intention will bear fruit going forward.
These actions will help you get insights that might not have been possible by being before the whiteboard or making flashy presentation. These actions will help you grow your initial set of users, define the target market that you must serve, gaining early loyal customers, testing products.
These actions will also prevent you from focusing on activities that are low value, making costly decisions, demotivated by small numbers.
Do –
Startups and their Founders must focus on Doing things that dont scale:
- Recruit Users Manually
- Delighting Users
- Giving Insane Experience
- Become a Consultant
- Focus on Small
- Test & Iterate
- Recruit Users Manually – Founders must go out into the market and do Sales. Getting your hands dirty by having first hand experience of sales will pay you in the long run. Become 1% better every day.
- Delighting User: Focus on making the initial set of users extremely happy. There is no Upper limit to delighting your customers. Also the hustle needed to delight a customer is higher in a Startup as compared to a Large Organization
- Giving Insane Experience: Focus on experience by your customer. Try giving Insane experience, be it Product or Documentation or your presentation.
- Become a Consultant: Act as a Consultant to your initial customers, solve their problems, understand what works for them and what doesnt, bring the knowledge and improve your products.
- Focus on Small: Avoid Big Launches if you can get big insights from small launches. Monitor your days and it will take care of your quarters. Focus on Narrow markets and grow big.
- Test & Iterate: Test try your product on a small market. Make changes to your product based on the feedback and then try it again. Make small iterations until you get a good product.
I found the blog of Paul Graham extremely informative. You can access the blog post here.
Hope this small posts would give you new perspective to your business and how you approach it.
~RG~