Paul Graham for early-stage founders: recruit your first users by hand, find ideas in your own problems, measure growth every week. Quotes from his essays, with links.
Paul Graham co-founded Viaweb in 1995 with Robert Morris, one of the first tools to build an online store from the browser. Yahoo bought Viaweb in 1998 for about $49 million and turned it into Yahoo Store.
In 2005 he co-founded Y Combinator with Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. YC has since funded Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox and Reddit. He has published his essays for free on paulgraham.com since 2001: this fast-track picks five ideas, with the exact quote and a link to each essay.
“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”
Photo : TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, cropped
Co-founds Viaweb with Robert Morris. The software runs on their servers and customers use it in the browser, a rare model at the time.
Yahoo buys Viaweb for about $49 million. The product becomes Yahoo Store.
Publishes a collection of his essays on programming and startups with O'Reilly.
Co-founds YC with Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Reddit is part of the first batch, in summer 2005.
Hands the YC presidency to Sam Altman and focuses on writing.
Each idea quotes Paul Graham word for word, with a link to the essay. On the right, one action to take in the next 7 days.
“The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.”
Essay Do Things that Don't Scale, July 2013
“Live in the future, then build what's missing.”
Essay How to Get Startup Ideas, November 2012
“A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing.”
Essay Startup = Growth, September 2012
“The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched.”
Essay Startups in 13 Sentences, February 2009
“Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is.”
Essay Startups in 13 Sentences, February 2009
| Decision | Principle | Action |
|---|---|---|
| First customers | Do things that don't scale | Onboard every customer yourself, one by one, until the product works without you. |
| Picking the idea | Organic startup ideas | Start from a problem you have lived through at work or in your life. |
| Investor updates | Startup = Growth | Send one number with its week-over-week growth rate. |
| Budget | Spend little | Cut every expense unrelated to the product your users ask for. |
Graham says it himself in Startup = Growth: a barbershop is not designed to grow fast. If you are building an agency or a profitable shop, keep his advice on customers and set aside the 5% weekly target.
The 5 to 7% weekly benchmark comes from YC startups tracked over 3 months. If your contracts take months to sign, measure monthly and review your pipeline every week.
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