Do Things that Don't Scale

I saw this on a miniature scale when I created a new subreddit (http://reddit.com/r/LSAT) I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links. Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the place became self-sustaining and grew to 1500 subscribers. I'm seeing the same thing again with a website I just…

Something I heard recently on some podcast which really resonated was (paraphrasing): "Inertia is the biggest issue for a startup. The world doesn't like you, doesn't think it needs you... and you've got to invert that. You have to create momentum by scratch and the most important thing a founder does, by an order of magnitude, is invert inertia. Literally, in a physical sense. Like the world stays at rest and you've got to create momentum." With that in mind…

I’ve been working on a programming language for a while, and this is one of the key bits of advice I’ve had in the back of my mind during that time. People have come along and contributed occasionally, but for the most part, I’m doing everything: writing the compiler, standard library, documentation, editor integration, blog posts, evangelism of the programming paradigm, and so on. Despite the fact that I don’t scale, I’ll happily sit down with someone who’s trying out…

It's so hard to put your finger on why exactly this strategy is so important. To illustrate this, consider these two options: 1. Your business needs to accomplish X. X is a manual task right now. It could take you 80% of your available time, but you would learn the ins and outs of your business. 2. The alternative is to hire someone to do X. Perhaps you could even find someone who is a specialist at X and much…