Get Your First Users by Doing Things That Don't Scale

A startup rarely takes off by itself. In the first months, growth comes from founders doing work by hand that could never scale.

Most founders build the product and wait for users to arrive. When the launch lands to a flat line, they go back to building or plan a bigger launch. The companies that got going did the opposite. Stripe set up early users' accounts on the spot, Airbnb's founders photographed hosts' apartments themselves, and DoorDash began as a page of PDF menus and the founders' own phones.

This course turns that manual phase into a method. You recruit named people one at a time and set them up while they are with you, measure growth week by week, give a small, dense group of users attention no large company can afford, and do the job by hand until you know exactly what to automate. You also learn the four ways founders avoid this work, and the point where manual help turns into a consultancy.

"Startups take off because the founders make them take off.", Paul Graham

Who it's for

First-time founders: launched a product to silence and need a concrete way to find and keep the first users.

Solo builders: want to know which jobs to do by hand now and which to automate later.

Service business owners: want a first group of clients who talk about the work to each other.