Paul Graham: What does it mean to do things that don't scale?

TL;DR

"Doing things that don't scale" means using handmade, painstaking, manual methods for early customers even though they cannot persist at scale. The core argument is that founders should do these unscalable actions early anyway, because without them the startup will never become large, and the process provides critical learning.

Key insights

• Unscalable actions are defined as "handmade artisanal painstaking" methods that feel impossible to sustain at a giant scale.
• The recommendation is to do those actions early because skipping them prevents ever reaching a large size—there is nothing to lose.
• A major benefit of unscalable work is learning: "you learn a lot from it."