Do things that don't scale : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot o... See more

But even so I'd advise startups to pull a Meraki initially if they can.Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups. You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you learn things you'd never have known otherwise.

One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale. . . . 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

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Silicon Valley startup culture embeds founders with the false belief that because growth is what matters most, we should pursue any and all strategies that could lead us there. Far wiser, and much more difficult because of the discipline and patience required, is ignoring those potential off-course avenues in favor of applying the experimentation,

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