Do things that don't scale : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator
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.
Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares • Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It would be a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something... See more
Paul Graham • Do Things that Don't Scale
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.