Startup User Acquisition

• Startups do not simply take off; founders make them take off with effort
• Some may grow by themselves, but usually a push is needed
• Manual user recruitment is a common, unscalable initial task for founders

Recruiting Users

• Most startups can't wait for users to come to them; they must actively acquire them
• Stripe is known for its aggressive early user acquisition
• The "Collison installation" involves founders setting up users on the spot
• Founders avoid manual recruitment due to shyness, laziness, and the initially small numbers

Compound Growth

• Underestimating the power of compound growth is a mistake founders make
• Measure progress by weekly growth rate
• A 10% weekly growth rate can lead to significant user base expansion over time
• Airbnb initially went door-to-door in New York to recruit users and improve listings

Fragility

• Early-stage startups are fragile and shouldn't be judged by the standards of established companies
• Focus on the potential size of the company if founders do the right things
• Initial actions may seem laborious but can be the optimal path to dominating a market
• Find users to recruit manually by solving your own problems or observing enthusiastic users from an initial launch

Delight

• Take extraordinary measures to make users happy
• First users should feel signing up was one of their best choices
• Founders should find new ways to delight them
• Customer service is not traditionally part of engineering training
• Worrying about scalability is not important in the early stages of the company
• Over-engaging with early users can improve the product

Experience

• Attention to users should be extreme
• Focus on the experience of being the user, not just the product
• Give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete product through attentiveness
• Engage directly with earliest users for the best feedback

Fire

• Focusing on a deliberately narrow market can be beneficial, similar to containing a fire to make it hotter
• Facebook started with Harvard students, creating a critical mass of users
• Marketplaces usually need to start in a subset of the market
• Build something for yourself and your friends, who are early adopters

Meraki

• For hardware startups, "pulling a Meraki" involves assembling products themselves
• Hardware startups face challenges due to high minimum order quantities for factory production runs
• Assembling products allows for faster design tweaks and valuable learning

Consult

• B2B startups can act as consultants for a single user, tailoring the product to their needs
• Consulting is work that doesn't scale, but it's beneficial if not paid for specifically
• Use software on behalf of users to recruit them
• At Viaweb, they built online stores for merchants to understand their needs and improve their software

Manual

• Do things manually that are planned for automation later
• Launch faster and know exactly what to build by doing it yourself
• Stripe initially signed up users for traditional merchant accounts manually behind the scenes
• Solve a solvable problem manually for as long as possible

Big

• The Big Launch strategy usually doesn't work
• Focus on making the initial users happy rather than the number of users from the launch
• Launches don't matter as much as founders think
• Partnerships usually don't work, especially as a way to get growth started

Vector

• Startup ideas should be thought of as pairs: what to build and the unscalable things to do initially to get the company going
• Both components contribute to the company's DNA
• The unscalable things should change the company permanently for the better
• If you have to work hard to delight users when you only have a handful of them, you'll keep doing it when you have a lot