- "Doing things that don't scale" means doing things in a handmade, painstaking way that may not be sustainable in the long run
- It is important to do these things early on because it helps in learning and gaining early customers
- The speaker discovered these lessons through personal experience and they are now taught to startups at Y Combinator

In the beginning, startups should do things that don't scale. Here, YC founder Paul Graham explains why.

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What doing things that don't scale means specifically is doing things in a sort of handmade, artisanal, painstaking way that you feel like, yeah, it would be great if you could do things that way forever, but in the back of your mind, you think to yourself, well, there's no way we could keep doing this and become giant, right?

And what do things that don't scale means is do those things early on anyway, because if you don't do them, you'll never be big anyway, so you got nothing to lose.

And also you learn a lot from it, you learn a lot.

And so I discovered a lot of these things that we teach startups at Y Combinator, or you teach startups at Y Combinator, I'm retired, I don't know if you know that.

But a lot of things you guys teach startups is are things that I hit myself and didn't realize that they were actually common startup lessons.

So 1 of them is doing things very manually for your early customers.

Like it's so important to get early customers that if you have to do a ton of manual stuff, that's okay, you'll learn a lot from it.


Speaker 0: What doing things that don't scale means specifically is doing things in a sort of handmade, artisanal, painstaking way that you feel like, yeah, it would be great if you could do things that way forever, but in the back of your mind, you think to yourself, well, there's no way we could keep doing this and become giant, right? And what do things that don't scale means is do those things early on anyway, because if you don't do them, you'll never be big anyway, so you got nothing to lose. And also you learn a lot from it, you learn a lot. And so I discovered a lot of these things that we teach startups at Y Combinator, or you teach startups at Y Combinator, I'm retired, I don't know if you know that. But a lot of things you guys teach startups is are things that I hit myself and didn't realize that they were actually common startup lessons.

So 1 of them is doing things very manually for your early customers. Like it's so important to get early customers that if you have to do a ton of manual stuff, that's okay, you'll learn a lot from it.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Paul Graham: What does it mean to do things that don't scale?