Seeing a lot of people shit on Paul, which I guess, why not, but it's not super useful or positive.
I think this is a fairly good essay which can be boiled down to "don't do premature optimization" or "don't try to behave like companies much bigger than you".
There are three advantages to this:
1/As a founder, get your hands dirty, even if in the grand scheme of things it's inefficient. You'll get first hand experience and feedback.
2/Avoid the upfront cost of "something that scales", and thus get quicker feedback.
3/Makes you different, very important in the beginning.
"Do things that don't scale" is a way to drive the point home and must not be taken literally...
qualeed · 1m ago
>Seeing a lot of people shit on Paul
Hardly "a lot". There's like three negative comments and one of them is strictly criticizing the article itself and not paul. I thought it brought up some good points.
pinkmuffinere · 14m ago
This is a great article! My cofounders and I read it when we were first starting our business, and it significantly impacted the decisions we make, usually for the better. But don’t forget to scale at some point!! For example, we’re still doing our own bookkeeping and tax filing. When we started it was simple and it was a “thing that doesn’t scale” which we could still do. But at this point it’s a waste of time. We’re finally outsourcing it, probably a year later than we should have. I think we overindexed on Paul’s advice a bit. Which, to be clear, is still really really good advice, just don’t take it too far.
Edit: business is mydragonskin.com
srameshc · 1h ago
I wonder if Paul has a take about the same in this era of AI
Cherry-picks winners: Uses only successful examples like Stripe or Airbnb while ignoring thousands of failed startups that tried identical manual tactics.
False choices: Presents manual work vs. scalable strategy as either/or when most successful companies do both simultaneously.
Has a One size fits all: Claims all startups must recruit manually, ignoring that enterprise products need fundamentally different approaches.
Instead, do the following...
- Interview failed founders, not successful ones: They'll tell you why things actually break (co-founder fights, cash flow, timing) instead of survivorship bias fairy tales.
- Optimize for "no," not "yes": Ruthlessly eliminate wrong customers instead of trying to delight everyone. False positives kill more startups than missed opportunities.
- Plan your failure modes first: Map exactly how you could die (regulation, key person risk, moats) and build defenses. Most founders only plan for unicorn outcomes.
- Copy boring businesses, because that is the secret of sucess. Dont copy sexy startups: Uber is just taxis with an app, Airbnb is hotels with no real estate., Netflix is just video rental with better logistics. The biggest "innovative" companies are doing boring businesses better, not inventing new categories.
I don't know him: would you care to elaborate why you think he's overrated?
rustystump · 36m ago
He, like Elon and others, has become a victim of success and being chronically online. There is no room for anything other than rote agreement with his pov. This makes taking anything he says seriously difficult as it is clear his ideas no longer get a priming pass by dissenting views from his inner circle.
Ycs rep overall has become damaged from his and others behavior which is unfortunate.
phendrenad2 · 20m ago
Yeah I think the "victim of own success" phenomenon is so inevitable, and so damaging to one's competence, that once someone has attained a certain level of success, I start to follow the opposite of their advice (especially if they start contradicting their previous beliefs)
EToS · 41m ago
Founders of Stripe, AirBnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, Reddit, GitLab might disagree
rustystump · 32m ago
He can be overrated while still having given money to successful companies like many other people who also gave money to those very same companies.
Elon is overrated and i think one could argue based on your metric that he would not be overrated?
anonyonoor · 34m ago
This was the very first post I saw on Hacker News.
Glad to see it reposted every now and then. Makes me nostalgic.
hedayet · 38m ago
I love this article so much, I'd created my first interactive tutorial based on this article.
positron26 · 39m ago
Yeah yeah yeah, could you just cut me a check for a cool million and I'll be back with a team and 100000000k customers in a month? Thx.
I think this is a fairly good essay which can be boiled down to "don't do premature optimization" or "don't try to behave like companies much bigger than you".
There are three advantages to this:
1/As a founder, get your hands dirty, even if in the grand scheme of things it's inefficient. You'll get first hand experience and feedback. 2/Avoid the upfront cost of "something that scales", and thus get quicker feedback. 3/Makes you different, very important in the beginning.
"Do things that don't scale" is a way to drive the point home and must not be taken literally...
Hardly "a lot". There's like three negative comments and one of them is strictly criticizing the article itself and not paul. I thought it brought up some good points.
Edit: business is mydragonskin.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913240
for him...
https://xkcd.com/1683/
False choices: Presents manual work vs. scalable strategy as either/or when most successful companies do both simultaneously.
Has a One size fits all: Claims all startups must recruit manually, ignoring that enterprise products need fundamentally different approaches.
Instead, do the following...
- Interview failed founders, not successful ones: They'll tell you why things actually break (co-founder fights, cash flow, timing) instead of survivorship bias fairy tales.
- Optimize for "no," not "yes": Ruthlessly eliminate wrong customers instead of trying to delight everyone. False positives kill more startups than missed opportunities.
- Plan your failure modes first: Map exactly how you could die (regulation, key person risk, moats) and build defenses. Most founders only plan for unicorn outcomes.
- Copy boring businesses, because that is the secret of sucess. Dont copy sexy startups: Uber is just taxis with an app, Airbnb is hotels with no real estate., Netflix is just video rental with better logistics. The biggest "innovative" companies are doing boring businesses better, not inventing new categories.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38019292
Ycs rep overall has become damaged from his and others behavior which is unfortunate.
Elon is overrated and i think one could argue based on your metric that he would not be overrated?
Glad to see it reposted every now and then. Makes me nostalgic.