In my career he blog post I think I’ve shared most is “Do Things That Don’t Scale” by Paul Graham. Even a decade after its publication, its insights are invaluable.
The article emphasizes the importance of validating ideas and business models in their infancy stages before launching into comprehensive development. It shares stories of successful companies that started under Graham’s guidance at YC, where they first practiced unscalable methods to ensure their feasibility and effectiveness, even if such methods couldn’t be sustained with hundreds or thousands of customers.
A couple of the key principles are:
Delight your customers
Market your product, even on a one-to-one basis
Provide an outstanding customer experience
Today we have no-code solutions and AI, which means more available scalable. However, the core message remains unchanged: Never build complex solutions before fully understanding and validating the problem with your customers.
If I haven’t shared this gem with you before, my sincerest apologies:)
Brendan McNulty 