🪴 Manual efforts drive startup growth

Scaling too soon will kill your startup. In the beginning, forget about automation, fancy workflows, or optimising for efficiency. These things won’t get you your first 100 customers.

What will? Doing the work that doesn’t scale.

Handhold your users. Talk to them, onboard them personally, and fix their problems manually. It’s messy, it’s hard, but it’s also how you uncover what they truly want. This isn’t just my advice—it’s a proven strategy used by founders who built billion-dollar companies.

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💭 TL;DR

🚗 Gritty customer acquisition

Think of your startup like an old car engine that needs a crank to get started. Once the engine is running, it can sustain itself, but getting it going often requires manual process.

This is where the concept of "doing things that don't scale" comes into play, a principle shipped by many successful startups have embraced.

One of the most common unscalable tasks founders must undertake is manually recruiting users. You can't wait for users to come to you; you have to go out and get them. 

Stripe, one of Y Combinator's most successful startups, is a prime example. Despite solving an urgent problem that could have attracted users organically, the Collison brothers were famous for their aggressive early user acquisition tactics. They didn't just ask potential users to try their beta; they took over their laptops and set them up on the spot. This approach, known as the "Collison installation," highlights the importance of proactive user acquisition.

Why do many founders resist this manual approach? Often, it's a combination of shyness and laziness. Writing code from the comfort of your home is easier than venturing out to talk to strangers and face potential rejection.

However, for a startup to succeed, at least one founder, usually the CEO, must spend a significant amount of time on sales and marketing.

Another reason founders ignore this path is that the initial numbers seem small and insignificant. They underestimate the power of compound growth. If you have 100 users and grow by 10% each week, you'll have 14,000 users after a year and 2 million after two years. This exponential growth is what turns small, manual efforts into scalable successes.

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😊 Delighting Your Users

Manual user acquisition is just the beginning. Once you have users, you need to make them incredibly happy. 

Wufoo, for instance, sent hand-written thank-you notes to each new user. This level of attentiveness is not just a nicety; it's a necessity for building a loyal user base.

We—founders, often resist this level of customer service because it doesn't scale, or so we think. However, in the early stages of a startup, you have nothing to lose by going the extra mile. Making your initial users super happy sets the tone for your company's culture and can lead to organic growth through word-of-mouth.

Steve Jobs' being famous for his mantra of creating insanely great products and painting the back of the fence is well-known, but what does this mean for an early stage startup?

It's not just about the product; it's about the entire user experience. Even with an early, incomplete, and buggy product, you can provide an insanely great experience through attentiveness.

🔥 Narrow market with hyper-focused engagement

In addition to manual user acquisition and delighting your users, another strategy is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. This approach, often referred to as the contained fire strategy, involves starting with a small, specific segment of the market to achieve a critical mass of users quickly.

Facebook started exclusively on Harvard campus, which allowed them to build a strong foundation before expanding to other colleges and eventually the broader public.

For B2B startups, taking this engagement to an extreme can be particularly effective. This involves picking a single user and acting as if you are consultants building something just for them. By focusing intensely on this initial user, you can refine your product to meet their needs perfectly, which often translates to meeting the needs of other users as well.

This consulting-like approach not only helps in refining the product but also provides valuable feedback and builds a strong relationship with your early adopters, setting the stage for broader market expansion.

This ensures that you are building something that truly meets the needs of your users, and the insights gained from this intense engagement can be scaled up as your user base grows.

By combining manual user acquisition, delighting your users, and focusing on a narrow market with extreme engagement, you can create a robust foundation for your startup's growth engine.

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