Do the stuff that won’t scale
Your first users won’t come from a funnel but from you, recruiting them by hand, one at a time.
Founders love building the machine before there’s anything to feed it: automated onboarding, referral engines, a drip sequence for 12 subscribers. Paul Graham’s 2013 essay says the opposite: “Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off.” And the most common unscalable thing founders have to do early is recruit users manually.
His examples are wonderfully unglamorous. When someone agreed to try Stripe, the Collison brothers didn’t promise to send a link. They asked for the person’s laptop and set them up on the spot, a move YC now calls the Collison installation. For as long as they could, Wufoo sent each new user a handwritten thank-you note. Airbnb’s founders went door to door in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings.
This week, skip the automation. Personally message 20 people who fit your ideal customer, offer to set them up yourself on a short call, and watch where they get stuck. You’ll learn more from those calls than from a dashboard full of anonymous visitors. Scale it later, once you know what’s worth scaling.
The example
- Instead of
- “We just launched! Sign up here: [link]”
- Try
- “Saw your post about chasing late invoices. Want me to set up Plunger for you on a 15-minute call?”
Before you flush
Message five people who fit your ideal customer and offer to set up your product for them personally on a 15-minute call.