Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Find the gold yourself first
One kind of founder raises a bit of money and immediately hires product people and salespeople to search for gold, while the founder wills an idea into reality. The other kind does a lot of the work personally: every customer conversation and every hard, menial task of building a company.
Most founders land in the first group. They want leverage and they want to scale before there is anything there. The most successful founders do everything themselves very early and obsess over the problem. They set a high bar for what figuring it out looks like, and when they clear it, they raise money to pay people to extract the gold they have already found.
People around a founder are usually glad to do top-level strategy work and to say let's go big now. Far fewer of them want to get their hands on the keyboard.
Why does doing the unscalable work come first?
Paul Graham of Y Combinator argued in his 2013 essay Do Things That Don't Scale that founders should recruit their first users by hand. Doing the work personally shows what customers actually want in a way that reports from employees rarely do. Founders who do this learn which problems are real before any payroll is committed. Stripe's founders famously set up customers' accounts themselves in the early days, a story Graham's essay told.
How did Airbnb's founders do the work themselves?
Airbnb's founders went door to door in New York to meet hosts, as Paul Graham and the founders have recounted. They photographed the listings themselves after noticing that poor photos were hurting bookings. They also lived with the product, staying in and hosting guests. The effort did not scale, and it taught them what a good listing looked like.
More from Inside Startup Funding
