Starting Your Go to Market: Doing Things That Won't Scale

Fifth of six on the steps of go to market.

Paul Graham published "Do Things that Don't Scale" (opens in a new tab) in July 2013, and the line everyone quotes is the instruction: "You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them." What it doesn't say is when to stop, which is the part that matters when you're the only person doing it.

Selling here means running an interview

If selling reads as boasting or as begging, the reframe that moves it is that this isn't selling yet. It's finding out what makes somebody pay, and the answer is worth more than the sale.

The opening ask is "can I ask how you handle X today?" The question never to ask is "do you want to buy this?" That's Rob Fitzpatrick's Mom Test discipline pointed at your own product: ask about past behavior and real spend, never about what somebody would hypothetically do.

From the first conversation onwards, consider the log of info you keep from this opening ask your bible. Record six fields: who they are, what triggered them to look, the pain in their own words, what they do about it today, what they'd have to give up to switch, and what happens next.

Reddit is where those conversations already are

For a founder with no audience, Reddit is the default first channel, and it has the fastest time to signal of any channel available to this audience: 1 to 7 days, zero cost, direct buyer intent. It's a giving channel, but treat it as a selling channel and you get ignored or banned (and often ridiculed), usually in that order.

Two registers

Describe the resource and let somebody ask for it. If the post would read dishonestly without a disclosure, put one line at the end. The comment is where the signal is earned, because you're joining a conversation somebody else owns.

Five things that turn a peer into a lecturer

Any one of these kills a comment:

• Observer-of-founders constructions. "I've watched founders do this."
• AI-pilled diagnostic openers. "The real issue isn't X, it's Y."
• Founder-class generalizations. "Founders often", "most founders".
• Aphoristic closers. "The money follows once the machine runs."
• Performative honesty. "Honestly", "the brutal truth is".

The fix is the same for all five: speak from your own experience, about the specific thing the thread is about, and stop.

Ninety out of every hundred posts give something away

Answer substantively first and mention the product rarely, at a 90/10 value-to-promotion ratio across everything you post. Build account karma before going near the strict subreddits, because promotional posting from a new account gets you immediately banned rather than downvoted. Keyword alerts are how one person covers more threads than one person can read.

Then the threads turn into names. List the 20 to 50 people who have the exact problem, by name, out of those same threads, and write to each one separately. Note a few things to them: the specific trigger, the pain you think it points to, one piece of proof you understand it, and a small next step sized to where they are.

What it looks like when a company does it

Mintlify (YC W22) published their version (opens in a new tab) on 26 January 2024. The first customer came through a personal connection and was onboarded about a month before the product worked, with the documentation migrated by hand. For the first ten customers, Han Wang writes they'd "spend hours or even days reviewing and editing a customer's content".

There's no equivalent published account from a solo founder with the figures attached. Everything verifiable here comes from companies of fifteen to forty-five people, which means the shape of what they did transfers and the rates they quote don't.

When the hand work has done its job

The stopping signal is four things happening: a known trigger, a known pain, a known objection set and a known close, all turning up often enough that you can predict the next conversation before having it. At that point a sequence written out of those conversations sounds like a person, and that’s because you’ve heard people say all those things before.

The case for automating from day one

A founder's time is the scarcest input there is, and doing by hand what a tool does adequately is a decision to have fewer conversations. Reaching 500 people this week instead of 40 next week buys a bigger sample of a worse signal, which is why it’s always better to always go narrow before going wide.

Where this usually goes wrong

The common failure isn't laziness, it's order. Writing the email sequence, segmenting an audience that doesn't exist yet, setting up the tooling: all of it feels like progress, and none of it needs a customer to be present. Three weeks of it can go by before anyone notices that nothing has happened yet.

The sequence is what the conversations produce.