My theory is that there are three regimes: Not Scaling, Scaling, and Antiscaling.
Not Scaling is about crossing and shoring up your moat. Scaling is when your app has enough hype around it that your customers recruit new customers, and all you have to do is add new machines or shard the database or whatever to handle increased demand.
Antiscaling is when you turn into the thing that everyone hates about the modern web. Antiscaling is when intelligence agencies want to talk to you about how your chat app is used by terrorists, when cities want to licence access to your ridesharing or takeaway delivery app, when pieces of legislation are passed that are specifically designed, when you're sufficiently well-known as the founder of an app that people are making memes about you and tracking your personal movements.
You don't have to take over the world, you just have to make money. People who try to change the world often change it for the worse; just try to make something useful, and maybe the world will like it.
shin_lao · 39m ago
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...
al_borland · 5m ago
It’s also important to realize that not every successful or worthwhile business has millions or billions of users that requires extreme optimization and scalability.
I work on internal tools at my company. We know how big our environment is, there isn’t much sensitivity to performance, and we don’t see random spikes that we don’t cause ourselves. Yet I had someone on my team who was obsessed with optimizing everything, to the point of changing his entire code base to a new language that only he knew, so he could save a few milliseconds on paper. Aside from him, no one noticed, no one cared. His optimizations just introduced risk, as he was the only one who could support what he built. When he left, we threw the whole thing away at management’s demand. Had it been a little more simple and slow, someone else probably could have taken it over without as much effort.
qualeed · 30m 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.
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
paulpauper · 2m ago
Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.
This was 12 years ago. Even he couldn't have imagined how successful it would still become. I wish there were I way I could have invested in it.
jillesvangurp · 2m ago
If you are going to be VC funded. Yes, absolutely. All you need is smoke and mirrors. And the ability to project confidence about what is otherwise an absolute fantasy that doesn't yet exist. Which is what many startups are until they get their house in order (with VC funding). Sometimes VCs get it right and they'll bore you endlessly about their successes. But the 95% that fail that they also invested in and probably shouldn't have is what they generally don't talk about a lot other than in terms of vague hints about acquihires, mergers, and other tried and proven strategies to make a bad investment look like a good one. The unremarkable airbnb clone, the tinder for X, Y, and Z that never panned out. The too good to be true yet-another market place that amounted to little. All of those.
If you are bootstrapping with revenue instead of money, customers won't be lining up for a product that won't work. They won't be interested in your self serving story about how you built the thing with duct-tape and mud while surviving on ramen noodles without sleeping for five months. That would scare them away probably. You actually need to build something that they would 1) buy and then 2) be happy about buying. And you won't have any VC donated cash to wow/lure/distract them with marketing either. You actually need to sell on product merit rather than founder reputation instead of using your reputation to separate VCs from their cash just so you can get the resources you need to not fake the product. Once the product has proven itself, the VC is redundant.
It's a very different game. Most of the things that work with VCs won't work with customers. And vice versa (you are going to slow, you should be focusing on X instead of Y, and all the other nonsense).
But the good news is, you won't need to scale for a while because bootstrapping isn't a fast process. The bad news is that you might not have a lot of time to fix your scaling issues when you do encounter them and they can and will sink your company if you can't. But the good news is that VCs might show up again that time. The bad news for them is that at that point they are generally too late to make a lot of money and will lose interest. You need a different type of investor at that point. It helps to not have too many huge scaling issues when you finally manage to convince customers that buying your thing is a good idea.
Figuring out the right balance between scalability and utility and when to focus on what is a judgment call in the end. Boring tech is usually a good call. Unless the tech is the main thing that you are selling. But don't let a VC tell you. They are just trying to get you to the 95% quickly just in case you don't make their 5% cut. All this business about scaling, keeping customers happy, etc. is just a distraction. It takes too much time. That could take years. They want months/weeks. They'll be happy to write investments off quickly. That doesn't mean it was a bad investment or plan.
VCs want unicorns or nothing. It's high stakes gambling. Most of the economy is a very different kind of business. There's nothing wrong with building a decent business with your hands and creativity.
laserlight · 28m ago
I had a friend who read this essay and understood it as “Don't do things that scale.”
anonyonoor · 1h ago
This was the very first post I saw on Hacker News.
Glad to see it reposted every now and then. Makes me nostalgic.
I rarely do comments just to say thank you for the great laugh, but when I do, I do it on HN.
Jabrov · 1h ago
This is the best comment I’ve ever seen
chubot · 2m ago
It is pretty profound. AI / deep learning failed to solve self-driving, but it’s good at moving text and code around, which humans still have to check
It’s arguable whether that’s “doing”
I’d say it’s more spreading knowledge around, which is super valuable, but not what is being advertised
The problem with self driving is that bad decisions can kill you, before anyone can check if it was a bad decision
raincole · 27m ago
I'm really, really surprised that no one has made this joke on HN so far after ~2.5 years of AI hype.
Congrats. You won HN today.
fuzztester · 1h ago
Things that don't scale do.
andrewmcwatters · 22m ago
It is entirely possible to do these manual things, acquiring users one or two at a time, and never having achieved escape velocity where your product does not garner enough attention such that its users recommend the product to others, and it grows by word of mouth itself.
I've built at least two of these that became the most popular solution in their space for a given problem, and if you don't have the constraints of a VC investor wanting their returns and eventually shutting you down, then you can realistically go for years without significant enough growth to even get past par with your direct competitors.
Or you realize that your competitors were never even big enough to meaningfully compete with in the first place because you didn't aim high enough.
pyrale · 1h ago
(2013)
belter · 49m ago
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.
Not Scaling is about crossing and shoring up your moat. Scaling is when your app has enough hype around it that your customers recruit new customers, and all you have to do is add new machines or shard the database or whatever to handle increased demand.
Antiscaling is when you turn into the thing that everyone hates about the modern web. Antiscaling is when intelligence agencies want to talk to you about how your chat app is used by terrorists, when cities want to licence access to your ridesharing or takeaway delivery app, when pieces of legislation are passed that are specifically designed, when you're sufficiently well-known as the founder of an app that people are making memes about you and tracking your personal movements.
You don't have to take over the world, you just have to make money. People who try to change the world often change it for the worse; just try to make something useful, and maybe the world will like it.
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...
I work on internal tools at my company. We know how big our environment is, there isn’t much sensitivity to performance, and we don’t see random spikes that we don’t cause ourselves. Yet I had someone on my team who was obsessed with optimizing everything, to the point of changing his entire code base to a new language that only he knew, so he could save a few milliseconds on paper. Aside from him, no one noticed, no one cared. His optimizations just introduced risk, as he was the only one who could support what he built. When he left, we threw the whole thing away at management’s demand. Had it been a little more simple and slow, someone else probably could have taken it over without as much effort.
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.
Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' manual examples? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38010992 - Oct 2023 (316 comments)
Do Things that Don't Scale (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26086196 - Feb 2021 (31 comments)
PG: “Do Things that Don't Scale” – What are some examples? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25898671 - Jan 2021 (2 comments)
Ask HN: How did you 'do things that don't scale' for your B2B startup? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15290433 - Sept 2017 (9 comments)
Do Things That Don’t Scale (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14957007 - Aug 2017 (37 comments)
Do Things that Don't Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765 - July 2013 (207 comments)
Edit: business is mydragonskin.com
This was 12 years ago. Even he couldn't have imagined how successful it would still become. I wish there were I way I could have invested in it.
If you are bootstrapping with revenue instead of money, customers won't be lining up for a product that won't work. They won't be interested in your self serving story about how you built the thing with duct-tape and mud while surviving on ramen noodles without sleeping for five months. That would scare them away probably. You actually need to build something that they would 1) buy and then 2) be happy about buying. And you won't have any VC donated cash to wow/lure/distract them with marketing either. You actually need to sell on product merit rather than founder reputation instead of using your reputation to separate VCs from their cash just so you can get the resources you need to not fake the product. Once the product has proven itself, the VC is redundant.
It's a very different game. Most of the things that work with VCs won't work with customers. And vice versa (you are going to slow, you should be focusing on X instead of Y, and all the other nonsense).
But the good news is, you won't need to scale for a while because bootstrapping isn't a fast process. The bad news is that you might not have a lot of time to fix your scaling issues when you do encounter them and they can and will sink your company if you can't. But the good news is that VCs might show up again that time. The bad news for them is that at that point they are generally too late to make a lot of money and will lose interest. You need a different type of investor at that point. It helps to not have too many huge scaling issues when you finally manage to convince customers that buying your thing is a good idea.
Figuring out the right balance between scalability and utility and when to focus on what is a judgment call in the end. Boring tech is usually a good call. Unless the tech is the main thing that you are selling. But don't let a VC tell you. They are just trying to get you to the 95% quickly just in case you don't make their 5% cut. All this business about scaling, keeping customers happy, etc. is just a distraction. It takes too much time. That could take years. They want months/weeks. They'll be happy to write investments off quickly. That doesn't mean it was a bad investment or plan.
VCs want unicorns or nothing. It's high stakes gambling. Most of the economy is a very different kind of business. There's nothing wrong with building a decent business with your hands and creativity.
Glad to see it reposted every now and then. Makes me nostalgic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38019292
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913240
for him...
https://xkcd.com/1683/
It’s arguable whether that’s “doing”
I’d say it’s more spreading knowledge around, which is super valuable, but not what is being advertised
The problem with self driving is that bad decisions can kill you, before anyone can check if it was a bad decision
Congrats. You won HN today.
I've built at least two of these that became the most popular solution in their space for a given problem, and if you don't have the constraints of a VC investor wanting their returns and eventually shutting you down, then you can realistically go for years without significant enough growth to even get past par with your direct competitors.
Or you realize that your competitors were never even big enough to meaningfully compete with in the first place because you didn't aim high enough.
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.