i loved @ycombinator's recent video on @paulg's famous "do things that don’t scale" essay. i was looking for a repo of examples and couldn’t find one, so I put one together! here’s almost 100 instances of startups doing things that didn’t scale. ➡️ comment below and I’ll dm you the full sheet. ➡️ reach out to @useinari and i’ll personally figure out how to improve your product. 1. provide a personalized and “insanely” delightful experience 💕 provide "insanely" high-touch, personalized service by manually onboarding users and giving extremely quick support and product velocity (ex: stripe, algolia, warp, liquifi) have an exact person in mind you’re building for and make your product experience perfect for them (ex: substack) create a low-volume of exactly personalized demos (ex: commandbar, behance) send handwritten thank-you notes to early users (ex: wufoo, reddit) 2. go directly to wherever your customers are ✈️ share and refine your product by physically going to places your customers exist and onboard + activate them there (ex: airbnb, tinder, pinterest, hipcamp, uber, blue Moon, rent the runway) earnestly engage and embed yourself within communities and events where your users exist (ex: pinterest, behance, etsy, github, netflix) 3. validate the problem manually and punt scale for later 🛠️ manually fulfill orders yourself or hack an existing product before building something scalable (ex: doordash, instacart, lugg, vanta, airbnb, groupon, zappos, starbucks, producthunt) manually assemble your initial product instead of being blocked on external partners (ex: cruise, pebble, meraki) choose a scrappy tech stack that works for the stage you’re at instead of building everything scalable (ex: gmail, facebook, levels) manually label or curate data to deeply understand a workflow and product requirements (ex: pandora, andrej karpathy) 4. start a deliberately contained fire 🔥 deliberately constrain the initial user base geographically or demographically (ex: facebook, tinder, farcaster, buildspace) focus intensely on a tiny niche and iterate on product until there’s fit (ex: tbh, bitcoin) 5. be relentlessly resourceful and creative 💡 surprise users by doing unscalable and unexpected campaigns (ex: airbnb, antimetal, brex) find workarounds and temporary hacks for tech limitations (ex: facebook, twitch) 6. consult while building the product 🤝 provide consulting services in the domain you’re building to deeply understand customer needs then build product (ex: looker, vanta) use your product on your customer’s behalf to speed up product development and onboarding (ex: viaweb) 7. ask for help and referrals 🙏🏼 beg friends, ex-colleagues, and your network for initial users and incentivize them to refer others (ex: linkedIn, quora, yelp, facebook, producthunt) ask for intros and referrals from investors, other founders, and related communities (ex: lyft, substack)