Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off.

The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness.

The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. This can't be how the big, famous startups got started, they think. The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth.

if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users manually and then gradually switch to less manual methods.

Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them.

It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself.

The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?"

If you build something to solve your own problems, then you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward.

Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that worked well.

I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy.

It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For a big company it's necessarily the dominant one. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.

The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get.

It's always worth asking if there's a subset of the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly.

The biggest danger of not being consciously aware of this pattern is for those who naively discard part of it. E.g. if you don't build something for yourself and your friends, or even if you do, but you come from the corporate world and your friends are not early adopters, you'll no longer have a perfect initial market handed to you on a platter.

As long as you can find just one user who really needs something and can act on that need, you've got a toehold in making something people want, and that's as much as any startup needs initially

When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later. This lets you launch faster, and when you do finally automate yourself out of the loop, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.

I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch.

why do founders think launches matter? A combination of solipsism and laziness. They think what they're building is so great that everyone who hears about it will immediately sign up. Plus it would be so much less work if you could get users merely by broadcasting your existence, rather than recruiting them one at a time.

It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You have to make an extraordinary effort initially. Any strategy that omits the effort — whether it's expecting a big launch to get you users, or a big partner — is ipso facto suspect