Insight From Y Combinator: Don’t Worry About Scaling
Some of this essay by Paul Graham is the usual patting-myself-on-the-back, rah, rah, rah VC self-promotion. But I think many of us when struck by a business idea that may contain the seeds of brilliance have trouble seeing how to get from here to there. We can imagine finding a few million to get started, assembling a clever, hard-working team, and releasing a product. We can also imagine the admiration, acclaim and cash that comes when that product has matured and proven itself in the marketplace. But the long slog in between, in which customers are acquired, support offered, feedback incorporated, more customers added (rinse, iterate, repeat) until the few dozen users are in the tens of thousands, that’s hard to conceive and wearying to dwell on. The advice to “do things that don’t scale” is to say that one has to take the next step first; that the later steps will be manageable when they’re needed. It sounds pithy but the job of getting a company from idea to on-its-own-two-feet profitability is such a daunting one it’s worth hearing “cross that bridge when you come to it” in terms that an entrepreneur can relate to from someone who has traveled the whole road more than once.
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