#43: Do Things That Don't Scale - Paul Graham

Paul Graham's advice is timeless. Created for start-ups but given what's transpired over the last year, it feels like most people I talk to, regardless of the size of company they work for, feel they're operating within the context of a start-up more so than ever before.

My top 5 highlights from the essential essay:

1. Solve Your Own Problems

2. The depth of your understanding of the problem is directly correlated to your ability to identify the success levers to solve it.

3. Niche Down

4. I'm all for narrowing your focus as much as possible and I ❤️ this sentence - "It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs."

5. Make Your Own Luck

6. Whether or not you've carried a bag, it doesn't matter.

7. Reframe the way you think about "sales" and understand it to be what it really is which is "evangelizing".

8. Go out everyday make sure the world knows exactly how you can help them solve their critical problems.

9. If you won't do it, why should anyone else do it?

10. Create Champagne Problems by Maxing Out Your Customer Experience Quotient

11. Acquire them manually and provide such an overwhelmingly positive experience for your initial customers that they tell so many other prospective customers about you that you get yourself in a situation where you aren't sure how to satisfy the incremental demand.

12. This is the kind of problem you want aka Champagne Problems.

13. Fall In Love With The Process + Never Ever Underestimate Compound Growth

14. If you have 100 users and grow them by 10% per week, you'll have 14,000 in 12 months and 2,000,000 in 24 moths.

You know what I mean?

February 10, 2021 (Tweet Link)