Do 10 things that don’t scale - Paul Graham

This week, we’re breaking down Paul Graham’s famous essay, Do Things that Don't Scale ( www.paulgraham.com/ds.html ). All product people have read this essay. If you haven’t, you better watch this video now. Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, published this essay ten years ago, but it’s still highly relevant today.
Doing things that don’t scale seems counter-intuitive when building a business, but giving your product the jump start it needs is necessary. Whether you’re a startup founder or a product manager launching a new feature or product, you need to do things that don’t scale to get your first users and feedback so that you can make your product the best it can be.
Read our guide on Substack: blog.academyofpm.com/p/do-thi...
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00:00 - intro
00:32 - Hand crank startups
01:02 - One Recruit
01:45 - Two Fragile
02:28 - Three Delight
03:02 - Four Experience
03:58 - Five Fire
04:33 - Six Pull a Meraki
05:32 - Seven Consult
06:15 - Eight Manual
06:53 - Nine Avoid the big launch.
07:26 - Ten Vector
About Sondra:
Sondra has over a decade of product management experience as former Product Lead at Google and Looker, former growth product manager at Upwork, and the first product manager at multiple startups. Here at Academy of Product Management, she shares the lessons she wished for when she started her career in product management. Past companies include Google, Looker, Upwork, CNET, AOL, and lots of startups. Sondra has a Bachelor's degree in Management Science from MIT. She is currently a startup consultant and CEO, founder, and lead instructor here at Academy of Product Management.
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[@masonfuerst]

Awesome video Sondra. I love this Paul Graham essay. But distilling these principles into something visual and engaging is amazing. Thanks for putting it together and sharing it with us.

[@academyofpm]

Thanks for the super nice comment @mason !

[@harrshasuri1035]

Loved the Product Vector Insight: In order to build scalable products, you need to do hard non-scalable things in the beginning! Thank You.

[@academyofpm]

Thanks Harrsha!

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Thanks so much. Charlie! That made my day

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Great video, I am not in any sort of startup, but I am in a service business, and a lot of these principles apply.

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[@academyofpm]

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keep going, you presentation skills are amazing.

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Such an amazing video. While I'm in the service base so many of these things apply. The video is well done.

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[@academyofpm]

Glad you enjoyed it!

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Good job! How insightful...

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thank you for this video!

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you and your channel is great.

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Thank you so much, Serbrad 😀

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this is awesome!

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