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Do Things That Dont Scale
Product / Advice
Before automation, do it by hand. Manual effort teaches what to automate.
The Idea
Paul Graham's essay: early-stage products need unscalable effort. Recruit users one at a time. Onboard them personally. Deliver value manually before you code. The things you can't scale are the things you learn most from.
Why It Matters
- Hand-delivered value reveals the real product.
- Talking to every user teaches patterns you can't extract from data.
- Early users become champions when treated well.
- Automation built on manual learning works. Automation built on assumptions doesn't.
How to Apply
- Seed your first hundred users yourself.
- Run onboarding calls. Watch them use the product.
- Deliver the service manually. Write code only for the repeats.
- Over-invest in customer support early.
When to Stop
When manual effort blocks growth more than it teaches. Then automate — but automate the lessons learned, not the guesswork.
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