Do things that don’t scale

Founders want to automate before they’ve served a single person. It feels efficient. It’s usually just hiding.

Do the opposite. Deliver the service manually, by hand, to your first handful of customers — the concierge approach. No software, no dashboard, just you giving them the result they paid for however you can.

It’s slow and it doesn’t scale, and that’s exactly why it works. You see every point of friction, every question, every reason they’d churn — the stuff no survey would ever surface. You’re not running a business yet; you’re running the world’s smallest research lab.

Automate later, once you know precisely what you’re automating. Build the machine after you understand the work, not before.