In July 2013, Paul Graham of the startup accelerator Y Combinator published an essay that begins: “One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale.” The most common such thing, he wrote, is “to recruit users manually.”
The founders of Airbnb went “door to door in New York, recruiting new users.” The founders of Stripe did not wait for a user to sign up. They said: “Right then, give me your laptop,” and set it up on the spot. Graham’s advice on launching: “All you need from a launch is some initial core of users.”