1. Your business needs to accomplish X. X is a manual task right now. It could take you 80% of your available time, but you would learn the ins and outs of your business.
2. The alternative is to hire someone to do X. Perhaps you could even find someone who is a specialist at X and much better at it than you are. Or you could perhaps focus on postponing X until you've written enough code that you can automate it.
Prior to PG's essay, the logical thing would have been to recommend the second approach. But today, most HN readers would agree - myself included - that the first approach is the right one. The best explanation I can offer is that building a startup is invariably a learning process, and doing X yourself forces the founder(s) to go through that process early on when the course corrections are cheaper.
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]
It's suddenly feasible to build businesses that require at-scale manual operations, because you can do so in a predictable, revenue-positive way.
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...
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).
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.
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.
Physical proximity still matters a hell of a lot. Especially on the margins when making something 1% easier is the difference between doing and not doing something.
Ironically pg is the guy who said the real world is really high bandwidth (Cities and Ambition) and that going where you have an audience is important. I share your frustrations about it being difficult to get to people to pitch them. Doubly when you aren't chasing an audience that spends all day in front of a screen.
- 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..."
> - 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.
