Lean Mobile App Development

Manually recruiting early adopters

Paul Graham, cofounder of the renowned startup incubator Y Combinator, probably coined the phrase, "Do things that don't scale."

In a much-cited essay bearing the same name, he said, "The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually." While cumbersome and slow, Graham says that nearly all startups must do this. To make his point, he relates the story of how the payment processing company stripe got started. The founders approached new users in person and used their laptops to create new stripe accounts right there on the spot.

Though certainly not scalable, manual recruitment may be necessary to acquire users. After you have gathered a group of early adopters, ...