Entrepreneurship · Library course
Do Things That Don't Scale: The Manual Phase of Every Startup
Your first users won't arrive on their own. Learn the manual, unscalable work that powers a startup's earliest growth before automation ever makes sense.
- Intermediate
- 7 lessons
- 56 min to complete
7-day preview, no card needed. The course is in the library the day your academy goes live.
Entrepreneurship
What it covers
What your people will learn.
- Entrepreneurship
The most successful startups began with founders doing tedious, hands-on work that could never scale: recruiting users one at a time and serving them obsessively.
Most founders build the product and wait for users to show up. They treat early growth as a marketing problem to automate, then watch their launch land in silence. The companies that survived did the opposite. They went out and recruited people individually, delivered service big companies could never afford, and manually performed the work their software would later handle.
This course is built on Paul Graham's argument that the manual phase is not a workaround but the real job of an early startup. You will learn why founders resist this work, how to give early users an experience that earns loyalty, and how to treat a startup as a vector of where it is plus the direction it is moving.
"Startups take off because the founders make them take off." - Paul Graham
Who it's for
First-time founders: launched a product and heard crickets, and need a concrete way to find and keep early users.
Solo builders: want to know which unscalable tasks to do by hand now and which to automate later.
Operators and PMs: want to understand why obsessive early service and manual delivery shape a company's trajectory.
The lessons
7 lessons, in order.
About 56 min to complete. Add the course and every lesson is yours to publish as it is, or to edit.
- Cranks, Not Mousetraps10 min
- Recruit Them One at a Time7 min
- Why You Won't Do This8 min
- An Experience Big Companies Can't Afford8 min
- Keep the Fire in a Bucket7 min
- Be the Software8 min
- A Startup Is a Vector8 min
In your academy
A starting point, not a rental.
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- 1
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- 2
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- 3
Practice
Practice and the tutor come with it
Type / in any lesson to add practice, from explain it back to drills and scenarios. Your people can ask the AI tutor about any lesson.
On the same shelf
Other Entrepreneurship courses your academy opens with. The library holds 150+ across eight tracks.
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