Central Theme
The core message, based on Paul Graham’s essay, is that to build a successful, large-scale company, you must first engage in unscalable, manual activities. This counterintuitive approach prioritizes direct customer interaction and learning over premature automation.
Key Points & Benefits
- Learn Customer Needs: Direct manual involvement builds deep customer empathy, which is invaluable for future development.
- Start Immediately & Cheaply: You can begin learning from users right away without the heavy upfront investment of designing and building software.
- Validate Before Building: When running a process manually becomes too painful, you know precisely what problem to solve with automation, ensuring the resulting technology is useful.
- Find Product-Market Fit Faster: Manual processes allow for quick experimentation and adaptation based on direct feedback.
- Fail Cheaper: It is less costly and emotionally taxing to stop a manual process than to remove established code or features that customers are not using.
Classic examples include Airbnb’s founders personally going door-to-door to photograph apartments and Jeff Bezos packing the first books for Amazon.
Conclusion
Embrace manual work in the early stages of a new product, feature, or company. This hands-on approach is the most effective way to validate your ideas and build a strong foundation. As Airbnb’s Brian Chesky says: “Do it until it hurts, then automate it away.”
Mentoring Question
What is one process in your work that you are trying to automate perfectly from the start, which you could instead begin doing manually to learn and adapt more quickly?
Source: https://sketchplanations.substack.com/p/do-things-that-dont-scale
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