The Manual-First Startup

aaronbrethorst 13 years ago |

Agree 100%. As an example, when I first created Cocoa Controls, I wrote a little Ruby app that iterated over every single one of GitHub's Objective-C repositories and stuffed them into a database, where I then manually checked each one to see if it was worth including. Literally every repository. By hand. It was a huge amount of effort, but it was also the only way to get the amount of content that I needed to make the site useful enough to get contributors to submit content.

Nowadays, the content volume is more than self-sustaining (I have 46 different repositories in my queue, all submitted by readers), but I still check every submission, clean them up by hand, and manually publish.

(https://www.cocoacontrols.com)

unoti 13 years ago |

At first I thought this was going to be like "write the manual first" a la Fred Brooks. But it actually made a great point. Yesterday for the first time I read pg's outstanding growth essay http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html which confirms many of these same excellent ideas.

chaz 13 years ago | |

I thought it was that, too, and it reminded me of Amazon's approach to product management, which is still pretty relevant to this post. Amazon's concept is working backwards, and they start with a press release of the product/initiative. It forces a clear articulation of what it is, how it's different, and who it's for. Internal circulation is used to refine it.

More details: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-dev...

dools 13 years ago |

Excellent advice and reminds me of the Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage article from Derek Sivers: http://sivers.org/hi

marban 13 years ago |

rafaelc 13 years ago |

tl;dr Do non-scalable things to reach product/market fit, then do scalable things

orangethirty 13 years ago |

I'm curious. My understanding of anything-first startups is that you do everything manually to test a market, grow your clientele, and turn a profit. In your post, you mention not being profitable yet, even with the injection of around 7.5 million dollars. As someone who is now used to building businesses that turn a profit before they launch, your situation is interesting. Note that I'm not looking to start a flame war, just genuinely interested.

vacanti 13 years ago | |

That's a good question. If you can create a startup that's profitable day one, that's great.

But, there are lots of businesses that need a fixed cost base that only turn profitable after millions of users. But, they turn very profitable with tens of millions of users.

If you restrict yourself to just ideas that are profitable day one, that's great though you may miss out on some great ideas.

orangethirty 13 years ago | | |

This is the way I see it:

If I have to scale to millions of users then my business plan is not as good as I thought. Why? Because as much as I'd like to think otherwise, tech startups do not produce a tangible product. Unlike automobile manufacturers, or hardware folk, we don't need a lot of money to build something big. All we need are people to write the code. Then we just focus on selling it. For me, a software product that requires millions of users to be profitable, is simply playing the lottery. I can play the lottery for $1 and not have to deal with investors and TC.

Someone might say that I lack experience doing so. Well, not really. I've been there, and done that. Online and offline. Nowdays, to me, its a matter of trying to win the millions lottery, or building something that makes me money without the drama of SV.

I know I'm wrong on various points. If you will, explain.

dpritchett 13 years ago | | |

OP left a quarter-million a year hedge fund job to swing for the fences. I'd guess his floor for "acceptable" exits is in the multiple millions. Your personal mileage my vary.

http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/08/03/why-i-quit-my-job-to-s...

vacanti 13 years ago | | |

I don't think you're wrong. It's a personal choice based on one's perceived strengths. Some people don't think it's a lottery. They think they can replicate success.

Personally, I do think there is skill involved unlike a lottery. But, I still think there's a fair amount of luck, too. In the end, I'm not sure I would start another company that didn't have the option of becoming profitable right away.

mcguire 13 years ago | |

As an aside, you say,

"In your post, you mention not being profitable yet, even with the injection of around 7.5 million dollars."

Investor's money has nothing to do with profit. You're profitable when you have customers giving you money, i.e. revenue, in excess of your expenses. The injection of capital is not revenue.

orangethirty 13 years ago | | |

True. My point is that if you can't make money with 7.5 million dollars, then something may be amiss.

kees 13 years ago | |

This business was riding on the wave of Groupon like deal sites.

The start-up was not so much about running a profitable business but about capturing the funding possibilities that came up due to the popularity and profitability of Groupon and its numerous clones.

orangethirty 13 years ago | | |

It may seem that way, but we cannot simply say that this is a fact. The founders might have some plans that would turn this market on its head. Though, at the same time, I see where this sort of behaviour comes from. Its the same reasons Dropbox clones got millions of dollars in funding, even though their product is a straight copy (and crummier).

6cxs2hd6 13 years ago |

Great point. This is, in business, is much the same principle as avoiding premature optimization, in coding.

rjjacobson 13 years ago |

Definitely agree on the virtue of doing stuff as manually as possible. Really hard though mentally as you always want to do things the right way. I guess at such an early stage though, the right way is whatever gets you feedback quickest.

bradleysmith 13 years ago |

Appreciate the post; have my own complex task also involving sorting that I was tempted to spin my wheels on building a tech to accomplish. Think I'll forego, and instead collect data on manual sorting instead.

wellboy 13 years ago |

Very good blog post, if there was a startup manual, this should be in it. :)

colemorrison 13 years ago |

That was awesome and showed a high level of grit and audacity. Kick. Ass.

quarterto 13 years ago |

Shameless offtopic plug: avoiding having to write crawlers and scrapers is exactly the problem we at http://import.io hope to solve.

helipad 13 years ago |

See also Derek Sivers, Version 0.1 = Start lo-fi http://sivers.org/lofi

niftylettuce 13 years ago |

here's another one: https://teelaunch.com