The original version of this essay is available at
http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html
Theoriginalversionofthisessayisavailableathttp：//www.paulgraham.com/ds.html
July 2013 2013 年 7 月
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be
founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a
better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist.
[1]
我们在 Y Combinator 给出的最常见的建议之一，就是要做不具规模的事情。很多未来的创始人认为，初创企业要么起飞，要么不起飞。如果你做了一个更好的捕鼠器，人们就会如约而至。如果没有，那么市场就一定不存在。[1]
Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves,
but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had
before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and
laborious process to get it going.
事实上，初创企业的腾飞是因为创始人的推动。也许有少数几家公司是自己成长起来的，但通常需要某种推动力才能让它们起步。一个很好的比喻就是汽车发动机在使用电启动器之前的曲柄。发动机一旦启动，就会一直运转，但要让它运转起来，还需要一个单独而费力的过程。
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.
创始人在创业之初最常做的一件无法扩展的事情就是手动招募用户。几乎所有初创企业都必须这样做。你不能等着用户来找你。你必须走出去，找到他们。
Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone
could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user
acquisition.
Stripe 是我们资助过的最成功的初创企业之一，他们解决的问题非常紧迫。如果说有谁能坐等用户，那一定是 Stripe。但事实上，他们在 YC 内部因积极获取早期用户而闻名。
Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and
none took better advantage of it than Stripe. At YC we use the term "Collison installation" for the technique they
invented. More diffident founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes, they say "Great, we'll send you
a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give
me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.
在我们资助的其他公司中，为其他初创公司提供服务的初创公司拥有大量潜在用户，而 Stripe 则更好地利用了这一点。在 YC，我们用 "Collison installation "来形容他们发明的技术。比较谨慎的创始人会问："你会试用我们的测试版吗？"如果答案是肯定的，他们会说："太好了，我们会给你发一个链接。"但科里森兄弟不会等。当有人同意试用 Stripe 时，他们会说："那好吧，把你的笔记本电脑给我"，然后当场给他们安装好。
There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and
laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected
by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time
on sales and marketing. [2]
创始人不愿意走出去单独招募用户有两个原因。其一是害羞和懒惰。他们宁愿坐在家里写代码，也不愿走出去与一群陌生人交谈，而且很可能被其中大多数人拒绝。但是，初创企业要想成功，至少有一位创始人（通常是首席执行官）必须在销售和营销方面花费大量时间。[2]
The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. This can't be how the
big, famous startups got started, they think. The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth. We
encourage every startup to measure their progress by weekly growth rate. If you
have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week. And while 110 may not seem much better than 100,
if you keep growing at 10% a week you'll be surprised how big the numbers get. After a year you'll have 14,000 users,
and after 2 years you'll have 2 million.
创始人忽视这条道路的另一个原因是，起初绝对数字看起来太小。他们认为，那些著名的大型初创企业不可能是这样起步的。他们犯的错误是低估了复合增长的力量。我们鼓励每家初创企业通过每周增长率来衡量自己的进步。如果您有 100 个用户，那么下周您需要再获得 10 个用户才能实现每周 10%的增长。虽然 110 个用户看起来并不比 100 个用户好多少，但如果您保持每周 10%的增长速度，您会惊讶地发现数字会变得如此之大。一年后，你将拥有 14000 个用户，两年后，你将拥有 200 万用户。
You'll be doing different things when you're acquiring users a thousand at a time, and growth has to slow down
eventually. But if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users manually and then gradually switch to
less manual methods. [3]
当你一次获取上千个用户时，你会做不同的事情，而且增长速度最终必须放缓。但是，如果市场存在，你通常可以从手动招募用户开始，然后逐渐改用人工较少的方法。[3]
Airbnb is a classic example of this technique. Marketplaces are so hard to get rolling that you should expect to take
heroic measures at first. In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door in New York, recruiting new users and
helping existing ones improve their listings. When I remember the Airbnbs during YC, I picture them with rolly bags,
because when they showed up for tuesday dinners they'd always just flown back from somewhere.
Airbnb 就是这种技术的典型例子。市场平台的启动非常困难，因此一开始就需要采取英勇的措施。就 Airbnb 而言，这些措施包括在纽约挨家挨户地招募新用户，并帮助现有用户改进他们的房源。当我回忆起 YC 期间的 Airbnb 时，我会想象他们拎着大包小包的样子，因为当他们出现在周二的晚宴上时，他们总是刚从某个地方飞回来。
Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and
engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure.
现在看来，Airbnb 似乎是一个势不可挡的巨无霸，但在早期，它是如此脆弱，大约 30 天的走出去与用户面对面接触，决定了成败。
That initial fragility was not a unique feature of Airbnb. Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of
the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them.
They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn
baby and concluding "there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything."
最初的脆弱并非 Airbnb 独有的特点。几乎所有初创企业最初都很脆弱。而这正是缺乏经验的创始人和投资者（以及论坛上的记者和万事通）对初创企业的最大误解之一。他们不自觉地以成熟企业的标准来评判初创企业。他们就像一个人看着一个新生儿，然后得出结论："这个小东西不可能取得任何成就"。
It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong. It's even ok if
investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss
your startup yourself. I've seen it happen. I often have to encourage founders who don't see the full potential of what
they're building. Even Bill Gates made that mistake. He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting
Microsoft. He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a
fraction of the size it turned out to be. [4]
如果记者和万事通对你的初创公司不屑一顾，那也无伤大雅。他们总是把事情搞错。如果投资者不看好你的初创企业，那也没关系；当他们看到企业成长时，他们会改变主意的。最大的危险是你自己会否定你的初创企业。我见过这种情况。我经常要鼓励那些没有充分认识到自己所创公司潜力的创始人。就连比尔-盖茨也犯过这样的错误。在创办微软之后，他在秋季学期回到哈佛大学。他在哈佛呆的时间并不长，但如果他当时意识到微软的规模甚至只有现在的一小部分，他根本就不会回来。[4]
The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this
company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at
the time. Microsoft can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic
interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect that was the optimal
path to dominating microcomputer software. And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to
the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to
survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market.
对于处于早期阶段的初创企业，我们要问的问题不是 "这家公司是否会占领世界？"而是 "如果创始人做了正确的事情，这家公司能做多大"。而正确的事情在当时看来往往既费力又无足轻重。当微软还只是几个在阿尔伯克基为几千名业余爱好者（当时被称为业余爱好者）编写 Basic 解释器的人时，它看起来并不令人印象深刻，但现在回想起来，这正是主导微电脑软件的最佳途径。我知道布莱恩-切斯基（Brian Chesky）和乔-格比亚（Joe Gebbia）在为他们的第一位主人的公寓拍摄 "专业 "照片时，并不觉得自己正在走向辉煌。他们只是为了生存。但回过头来看，这也是主导大市场的最佳途径。
How do you find users to recruit manually? If you build something to solve your own
problems, then you only have to find your peers, which is usually
straightforward. Otherwise you'll have to make a more deliberate effort to locate the most promising vein of users. The
usual way to do that is to get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted launch, and then to observe
which kind seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them. For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the
earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and
that worked well. [5]
如何找到用户进行人工招募？如果您创建的东西是为了解决您自己的问题，那么您只需找到您的同行，这通常很简单。否则，您就必须付出更多的努力来寻找最有潜力的用户脉络。通常的方法是通过相对无针对性的发布来获得一些初始用户，然后观察哪类用户看起来最有热情，并寻找更多类似的用户。例如，本-西尔伯曼（Ben Silbermann）注意到，最早的 Pinterest 用户中有很多人对设计感兴趣，于是他参加了一个设计博主会议来招募用户，效果不错。[5]
You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. For as long as they could
(which turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. Your first users
should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. And you in turn should be racking your
brains to think of new ways to delight them.
不仅要采取非常措施来获取用户，还要让他们满意。Wufoo 在力所能及的范围内（结果出乎意料地长），给每位新用户都寄去了手写的感谢信。你的第一批用户应该觉得与你签约是他们做出的最好选择之一。反过来，您也应该绞尽脑汁，想出新的办法来取悦他们。
Why do we have to teach startups this? Why is it counterintuitive for founders? Three reasons, I think.
我们为什么要教初创企业这些？为什么这与创始人的直觉相悖？我认为有三个原因。
One is that a lot of startup founders are trained as engineers, and customer service is not part of the training of
engineers. You're supposed to build things that are robust and elegant, not be slavishly attentive to individual users
like some kind of salesperson. Ironically, part of the reason engineering is traditionally averse to handholding is that
its traditions date from a time when engineers were less powerful — when they were only in charge of their narrow domain
of building things, rather than running the whole show. You can be ornery when you're Scotty, but not when you're Kirk.
一个原因是，很多初创公司的创始人都是工程师出身，而客户服务并不是工程师培训的一部分。你应该打造的是坚固而优雅的产品，而不是像推销员一样对用户不厌其烦。具有讽刺意味的是，工程学之所以历来不喜欢颐指气使，部分原因在于其传统来自于工程师权力较小的时代--那时他们只负责自己狭小的制造领域，而不是掌管全局。当你是斯科蒂（Scotty）时，你可以脾气暴躁，但当你是柯克（Kirk）时就不行了。
Another reason founders don't focus enough on individual customers is that they worry it won't scale. But when founders
of larval startups worry about this, I point out that in their current state they have nothing to lose. Maybe if they go
out of their way to make existing users super happy, they'll one day have too many to do so much for. That would be a
great problem to have. See if you can make it happen. And incidentally, when it does, you'll find that delighting
customers scales better than you expected. Partly because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than you
would have predicted, and partly because delighting customers will by then have permeated your culture.
创始人不够关注个人客户的另一个原因是，他们担心这样做无法扩大规模。但当初创公司的创始人担心这个问题时，我会指出，在他们目前的状态下，他们没有什么可失去的。也许如果他们不遗余力地让现有用户超级满意，有一天他们就会有太多的用户，无法为他们做那么多事。这将是一个很好的问题。看看你能不能让它发生。顺便提一句，当你做到这一点时，你会发现取悦客户的效果比你预想的要好。部分原因是，你通常能找到方法让任何事情的规模超出你的预期，部分原因是，到那时，取悦客户已经渗透到你的企业文化中。
I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy.
我从未见过一家初创企业因为过于努力地让最初的用户满意而被引诱到盲区。
But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing how attentive they could be to their users is that
they've never experienced such attention themselves. Their standards for customer service have been set by the companies
they've been customers of, which are mostly big ones. Tim Cook doesn't send you a hand-written note after you buy a
laptop. He can't. But you can. That's one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company
can. [6]
但是，阻碍创始人意识到他们可以如何为用户提供周到服务的最大原因可能是，他们自己从未体验过这种关注。他们的客户服务标准是由他们的客户公司（大多是大公司）设定的。蒂姆-库克不会在你购买笔记本电脑后给你寄一张手写的便条。他不能。但你可以。这就是小公司的优势之一：你可以提供大公司无法提供的服务。[6]
Once you realize that existing conventions are not the upper bound on user experience, it's interesting in a very
pleasant way to think about how far you could go to delight your users.
一旦你意识到现有的惯例并不是用户体验的上限，那么你就会以一种非常愉快的方式去思考你能在多大程度上取悦你的用户。
I was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention to users should be, and I realized Steve Jobs had
already done it: insanely great. Steve wasn't just using "insanely" as a synonym for "very." He meant it more literally
— that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological.
我一直在想一个词来表达你对用户的关注应该有多极致，后来我意识到史蒂夫-乔布斯（Steve Jobs）已经做到了："疯狂地伟大"（insanely great）。史蒂夫并不只是把 "insanely "当作 "very "的同义词。他的意思更直白--一个人对执行质量的关注程度，应该达到在日常生活中被认为是病态的程度。
All the most successful startups we've funded have, and that probably doesn't surprise would-be founders. What novice
founders don't get is what insanely great translates to in a larval startup. When Steve Jobs started using that phrase,
Apple was already an established company. He meant the Mac (and its documentation and even packaging — such is the
nature of obsession) should be insanely well designed and manufactured. That's not hard for engineers to grasp. It's
just a more extreme version of designing a robust and elegant product.
我们资助过的所有最成功的初创企业都是如此，这一点可能不会让新手创始人感到惊讶。新手创始人不明白的是，在一家初创企业中，"疯狂的伟大 "意味着什么。当史蒂夫-乔布斯开始使用这句话时，苹果已经是一家成熟的公司。他的意思是，Mac（及其文档甚至包装--这就是痴迷的本质）的设计和制造应该好得令人难以置信。这对工程师来说并不难理解。这只是设计出坚固耐用、美观大方的产品的一个更极端的版本。
What founders have a hard time grasping (and Steve himself might have had a hard time grasping) is what insanely great
morphs into as you roll the time slider back to the first couple months of a startup's life. It's not the product that
should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For a big
company it's necessarily the dominant one. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early,
incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
创始人很难理解的是（史蒂夫本人可能也很难理解），当你把时间滑块拉回到初创企业生命的最初几个月时，"疯狂的伟大 "会变成什么。真正伟大的不是产品，而是用户体验。产品只是其中的一个组成部分。对于大公司来说，它一定是最主要的部分。但是，如果你用心去弥补差距，你就可以也应该让用户在早期、不完整、有漏洞的产品上获得极佳的体验。
Can, perhaps, but should? Yes. Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth
rolling. For most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good. Making a
better mousetrap is not an atomic operation. Even if you start the way most successful startups have, by building
something you yourself need, the first thing you build is never quite right. And except in domains with big penalties
for making mistakes, it's often better not to aim for perfection initially. In software, especially, it usually works
best to get something in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility, and then see what they do with it.
Perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination, and in any case your initial model of users is always inaccurate,
even if you're one of them. [7]
也许可以，但应该吗？应该。过度吸引早期用户并不仅仅是一种允许的促进增长的技巧。对于大多数成功的初创企业来说，这是使产品优秀的反馈循环的必要组成部分。制作一个更好的捕鼠器并不是一件简单的事情。即使你像大多数成功的初创企业那样，从制造你自己需要的东西开始，你制造的第一件东西也永远不会完全正确。除非是在犯错会受到重罚的领域，否则一开始最好不要追求完美。尤其是在软件领域，通常最好的做法是，一旦有了一定量的实用性，就立即把它呈现在用户面前，然后再看他们如何使用它。完美主义往往是拖延的借口，而且无论如何，你最初的用户模型总是不准确的，即使你也是用户之一。[7]
The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get. When you're so big
you have to resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users' homes and offices and watch them use
your stuff like you did when there were only a handful of them.
与最早的用户直接接触所得到的反馈将是你所能得到的最好的反馈。当你的公司发展壮大到不得不求助于焦点小组时，你会希望能去用户的家里和办公室，看他们使用你的产品，就像你在只有少数用户时那样。
Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at
first to get it really hot before adding more logs.
有时，无法扩展的正确诀窍就是刻意专注于狭窄的市场。这就好比一开始要控制火势，让它真正燃烧起来，然后再添加更多的木头。
That's what Facebook did. At first it was just for Harvard students. In that form it only had a potential market of a
few thousand people, but because they felt it was really for them, a critical mass of them signed up. After Facebook
stopped being for Harvard students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while. When I interviewed
Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School, he said that while it was a lot of work creating course lists for each school, doing
that made students feel the site was their natural home.
Facebook 就是这么做的。起初，它只面向哈佛大学的学生。在这种形式下，它只有几千人的潜在市场，但因为他们觉得它是真正为他们服务的，所以有大量的人注册了。在 Facebook 不再为哈佛学生服务之后，它在相当长的一段时间内仍然为特定学院的学生服务。我在创业学校采访马克-扎克伯格时，他说虽然为每所学校创建课程列表工作量很大，但这样做让学生们觉得这个网站就是他们的家。
Any startup that could be described as a marketplace usually has to start in a subset of the market, but this can work
for other startups as well. It's always worth asking if there's a subset of the market in which you can get a critical
mass of users quickly. [8]
任何可以被称为市场的初创企业通常都必须从市场的一个子集开始，但这也适用于其他初创企业。值得一问的是，是否有一个市场子集能让你迅速获得足够多的用户。[8]
Most startups that use the contained fire strategy do it unconsciously. They build something for themselves and their
friends, who happen to be the early adopters, and only realize later that they could offer it to a broader market. The
strategy works just as well if you do it unconsciously. The biggest danger of not being consciously aware of this
pattern is for those who naively discard part of it. E.g. if you don't build something for yourself and your friends, or
even if you do, but you come from the corporate world and your friends are not early adopters, you'll no longer have a
perfect initial market handed to you on a platter.
大多数初创企业都是在无意识的情况下采用 "遏制火力 "战略的。他们为自己和朋友（他们恰好是早期采用者）创建一些东西，后来才意识到他们可以将其提供给更广泛的市场。如果你是在无意识的情况下这样做的，那么这个战略也同样有效。不自觉地意识到这一模式的最大危险在于那些天真地放弃其中一部分的人。例如，如果你不为自己和朋友创造一些东西，或者即使你创造了，但你来自企业界，而你的朋友不是早期采用者，那么你就不再有一个完美的初始市场。
Among companies, the best early adopters are usually other startups. They're more open to new things both by nature and
because, having just been started, they haven't made all their choices yet. Plus when they succeed they grow fast, and
you with them. It was one of many unforeseen advantages of the YC model (and specifically of making YC big) that B2B
startups now have an instant market of hundreds of other startups ready at hand.
在公司中，最好的早期采用者通常是其他初创公司。他们对新事物更开放，这既是天性使然，也是因为他们刚刚起步，还没有做出所有的选择。另外，当他们成功时，他们会快速成长，而你也会和他们一起成长。这是 YC 模式（特别是将 YC 做大）的众多意外优势之一，B2B 初创公司现在拥有一个由数百家其他初创公司组成的即时市场。
For hardware startups there's a variant of doing things that don't scale that we
call "pulling a Meraki." Although we didn't fund Meraki, the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, so we know
their history. They got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves.
对于硬件初创企业来说，有一种不具规模的变体，我们称之为 "模仿 Meraki"。虽然我们没有为 Meraki 提供资金，但其创始人曾是罗伯特-莫里斯的研究生，因此我们了解他们的历史。他们的起步方式是做一些确实无法扩展的事情：自己组装路由器。
Hardware startups face an obstacle that software startups don't. The minimum order for a factory production run is
usually several hundred thousand dollars. Which can put you in a catch-22: without a product you can't generate the
growth you need to raise the money to manufacture your product. Back when hardware startups had to rely on investors for
money, you had to be pretty convincing to overcome this. The arrival of crowdfunding (or more precisely, preorders) has
helped a lot. But even so I'd advise startups to pull a Meraki initially if they can. That's what Pebble did. The
Pebbles assembled the first several hundred
watches themselves. If they hadn't gone through that phase, they probably wouldn't have sold $10 million worth of
watches when they did go on Kickstarter.
硬件初创企业面临着软件初创企业所没有的障碍。工厂生产的最低订单通常需要几十万美元。这可能会让你陷入困境：没有产品，你就无法实现增长，也就无法筹集到生产产品所需的资金。在硬件初创企业不得不依靠投资者来筹集资金的年代，要克服这一困难，你必须有足够的说服力。众筹（更准确地说，是预购）的出现帮了大忙。但即便如此，我还是建议初创企业在最初阶段尽可能采取 Meraki 的做法。Pebble 就是这么做的。Pebbles 自己组装了首批几百块手表。如果没有经历这一阶段，他们在 Kickstarter 上推出的手表很可能卖不出价值 1,000 万美元的价格。
Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware
startups. You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you learn things you'd never have known
otherwise. Eric Migicovsky of Pebble said one of the things he learned was "how valuable it was to source good screws."
Who knew?
就像过度关注早期客户一样，自己制造东西对硬件初创公司来说也很有价值。当你是工厂时，你可以更快地调整设计，而且你还能学到其他方式永远不知道的东西。Pebble 公司的埃里克-米基科夫斯基（Eric Migicovsky）说，他学到的其中一件事就是 "采购好的螺丝钉是多么有价值"。谁知道呢？
Sometimes we advise founders of B2B startups to take over-engagement to an extreme, and to pick a single user and act as
if they were consultants building something just for that one user. The initial user serves as the form for your mold;
keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something other users want too.
Even if there aren't many of them, there are probably adjacent territories that have more. As long as you can find just
one user who really needs something and can act on that need, you've got a toehold in making something people want, and
that's as much as any startup needs initially. [9]
有时，我们会建议 B2B 初创公司的创始人将过度参与发挥到极致，选择一个用户，就好像他们是顾问一样，只为这一个用户打造产品。最初的用户就是你的模子；不断调整，直到完全符合他们的需求，你通常会发现你做出了其他用户也想要的东西。即使他们人数不多，邻近地区也可能有更多。只要你能找到一个真正需要某样东西的用户，并能根据这个需求采取行动，你就有了制造人们想要的东西的基础，而这正是任何初创公司最初都需要的。[9]
Consulting is the canonical example of work that doesn't scale. But (like other ways of bestowing one's favors
liberally) it's safe to do it so long as you're not being paid to. That's where companies cross the line. So long as
you're a product company that's merely being extra attentive to a customer, they're very grateful even if you don't
solve all their problems. But when they start paying you specifically for that attentiveness — when they start paying
you by the hour — they expect you to do everything.
咨询工作是不具规模的典型例子。但是（就像其他随意施舍恩惠的方式一样），只要不被收买，做这种工作是安全的。这就是公司越界的地方。只要你是一家产品公司，只是对客户格外关照，即使你没有解决他们所有的问题，他们也会非常感激。但是，当他们开始专门为你的细心而支付报酬时，当他们开始按小时支付报酬时，他们就会希望你做所有的事情。
Another consulting-like technique for recruiting initially lukewarm users is to use your software yourselves on their
behalf. We did that at Viaweb. When we approached merchants asking if they wanted to use our software to make online
stores, some said no, but they'd let us make one for them. Since we would do anything to get users, we did. We felt
pretty lame at the time. Instead of organizing big strategic e-commerce partnerships, we were trying to sell luggage and
pens and men's shirts. But in retrospect it was exactly the right thing to do, because it taught us how it would feel to
merchants to use our software. Sometimes the feedback loop was near instantaneous: in the middle of building some
merchant's site I'd find I needed a feature we didn't have, so I'd spend a couple hours implementing it and then resume
building the site.
另一种类似于咨询的招揽初期冷淡用户的方法是，自己代他们使用软件。我们在 Viaweb 就是这样做的。当我们联系商家，询问他们是否愿意使用我们的软件制作网店时，有些商家表示不愿意，但他们愿意让我们为他们制作网店。既然我们愿意不惜一切代价争取用户，那我们就做了。我们当时觉得自己很逊。我们没有组织大型的战略性电子商务合作，而是试图销售行李箱、钢笔和男士衬衫。但现在回想起来，这样做是完全正确的，因为它让我们了解了商家使用我们软件的感受。有时，反馈回路几乎是瞬时的：在建立某个商家网站的过程中，我会发现我需要一个我们没有的功能，于是我会花几个小时来实现它，然后继续建立网站。
There's a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software, but are your software. When you only have a small
number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later. This lets you
launch faster, and when you do finally automate yourself out of the loop, you'll know exactly what to build because
you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.
还有一种更极端的变体，即你不仅使用软件，而且是软件的使用者。当你只有少量用户时，有时你可以手工完成一些计划稍后自动化的工作。这可以让你更快地启动，而且当你最终将自己从循环中自动化出来时，你会清楚地知道该构建什么，因为你已经有了亲自动手的肌肉记忆。
When manual components look to the user like software, this technique starts to have aspects of a practical joke. For
example, the way Stripe delivered "instant" merchant accounts to its first users was that the founders manually signed
them up for traditional merchant accounts behind the scenes.
当人工组件在用户看来就像软件时，这种技术就开始有了恶作剧的意味。例如，Stripe 向首批用户提供 "即时 "商户账户的方式，就是创始人在幕后手动为他们注册传统商户账户。
Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can
solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It would be
a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far
more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems.
有些初创企业一开始可能完全靠人工。如果你能找到有问题需要解决的人，而你又能手动解决它，那就尽可能长时间地这样做，然后逐渐将瓶颈自动化。以一种尚未自动化的方式来解决用户的问题会让人有点害怕，但比起更常见的情况，即拥有一些尚未解决任何人问题的自动设备，这种情况就没那么可怕了。
I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who
seem to believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and that they'll make it big if and only if
they're launched with sufficient initial velocity. They want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, with
embargoes. And on a tuesday, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something.
我应该提到一种通常不起作用的初始策略：大发射。我偶尔会遇到一些创始人，他们似乎认为初创公司是弹丸，而不是动力飞机，只有以足够的初始速度发射出去，他们才能大展宏图。他们想同时在 8 份不同的刊物上发表文章，而且要有禁发条款。当然，还得选在周二，因为他们在某处看到，周二是最适合发布信息的日子。
It's easy to see how little launches matter. Think of some successful startups. How many of their launches do you
remember? All you need from a launch is some initial core of users. How well you're doing a few months later will depend
more on how happy you made those users than how many there were of them. [10]
不难看出，启动是多么不重要。想想一些成功的初创企业。你还记得多少他们的启动仪式？你所需要的仅仅是一些最初的核心用户。几个月后，你的业绩如何将更多地取决于你让这些用户有多开心，而不是他们有多少人。[10]
So why do founders think launches matter? A combination of solipsism and laziness. They think what they're building is
so great that everyone who hears about it will immediately sign up. Plus it would be so much less work if you could get
users merely by broadcasting your existence, rather than recruiting them one at a time. But even if what you're building
really is great, getting users will always be a gradual process — partly because great things are usually also novel,
but mainly because users have other things to think about.
那么，为什么创始人认为发射很重要呢？孤独和懒惰的结合。他们认为自己正在创建的东西是如此伟大，以至于每个人听到它都会立即注册。另外，如果你只需通过广播就能获得用户，而不是一个一个地招募用户，那就省事多了。但是，即使你创建的东西真的很棒，获取用户也总是一个循序渐进的过程--部分原因是很棒的东西通常也很新颖，但主要原因是用户还有其他事情要考虑。
Partnerships too usually don't work. They don't work for startups in general, but they especially don't work as a way to
get growth started. It's a common mistake among inexperienced founders to believe that a partnership with a big company
will be their big break. Six months later they're all saying the same thing: that was way more work than we expected,
and we ended up getting practically nothing out of it. [11]
合伙关系通常也行不通。对于初创企业来说，合伙关系一般都不起作用，但作为一种启动增长的方式，合伙关系尤其不起作用。经验不足的创始人通常会犯一个错误，那就是认为与大公司合作将是他们的重大突破。六个月后，他们都会说同样的话：这比我们预想的要费劲得多，而且我们最终几乎一无所获。[11]
It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You have to make an extraordinary effort initially. Any
strategy that omits the effort — whether it's expecting a big launch to get you users, or a big partner — is ipso facto
suspect.
仅仅在最初做一些非凡的事情是不够的。你必须在最初做出非凡的努力。任何省略努力的战略--无论是期待一场盛大的发布会为你带来用户，还是期待一个强大的合作伙伴--都是值得怀疑的。
The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop
thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build,
plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.
创业需要做一些难以扩展的事情，这几乎是一个普遍现象，因此，最好不要再把初创公司的想法看作是标量。相反，我们应该试着把它们看成是一对对的：你要建立的东西，加上你最初要做的无法扩展的事情，以便让公司开始运作。
It could be interesting to start viewing startup ideas this way, because now that there are two components you can try
to be imaginative about the second as well as the first. But in most cases the second component will be what it usually
is — recruit users manually and give them an overwhelmingly good experience — and the main benefit of treating startups
as vectors will be to remind founders they need to work hard in two dimensions. [12]
以这种方式看待初创企业的想法可能会很有趣，因为既然有两个组成部分，你就可以尝试对第二个组成部分和第一个组成部分发挥想象力。但在大多数情况下，第二部分就会像往常一样--手动招募用户并给他们带来极好的体验--而把初创企业视为矢量的主要好处就是提醒创始人他们需要在两个维度上努力工作。[12]
In the best case, both components of the vector contribute to your company's DNA: the unscalable things you have to do
to get started are not merely a necessary evil, but change the company permanently for the better. If you have to be
aggressive about user acquisition when you're small, you'll probably still be aggressive when you're big. If you have to
manufacture your own hardware, or use your software on users's behalf, you'll learn things you couldn't have learned
otherwise. And most importantly, if you have to work hard to delight users when you only have a handful of them, you'll
keep doing it when you have a lot.
在最好的情况下，矢量的两个组成部分都会为公司的 DNA 做出贡献：你在起步阶段必须做的那些无法扩展的事情不仅仅是必要之恶，而且会永久性地改变公司，使其变得更好。如果你在小公司时必须积极争取用户，那么当你成为大公司时，你可能仍然会积极争取用户。如果你必须制造自己的硬件，或代表用户使用你的软件，你就会学到其他方式学不到的东西。最重要的是，如果在只有少数用户时，你必须努力取悦用户，那么当你拥有大量用户时，你就会继续这样做。
[1] Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically. He wrote "If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or
pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad
hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods."
[1] 实际上，爱默生从未专门提到过捕鼠器。他写道："如果一个人有上好的玉米、木材、木板或猪可卖，或者能比别人做更好的椅子或刀、坩埚或教堂风琴，你就会发现一条通往他家的宽阔而坚硬的路，尽管它是在树林里"。
[2] Thanks to Sam Altman for suggesting I make this explicit. And no, you can't avoid doing sales by hiring someone to
do it for you. You have to do sales yourself initially. Later you can hire a real salesperson to replace you.
[2] 感谢山姆-奥特曼建议我明确这一点。不，你不能通过雇人代劳来避免做销售。一开始，你必须自己做销售。之后，你可以雇一个真正的销售人员来代替你。
[3] The reason this works is that as you get bigger, your size helps you grow. Patrick Collison wrote "At some point,
there was a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. It tipped from being this boulder we had to push to being a train
car that in fact had its own momentum."
[3] 这样做的原因是，当你变大时，你的体型会帮助你成长。帕特里克-科里森写道："在某个时刻，Stripe 的感觉发生了非常明显的变化。它从我们必须推动的一块巨石，变成了一节车厢，事实上，它有自己的动力。
[4] One of the more subtle ways in which YC can help founders is by calibrating their ambitions, because we know
exactly how a lot of successful startups looked when they were just getting started.
[4] YC 可以帮助创始人的一个更微妙的方法是调整他们的雄心壮志，因为我们清楚地知道许多成功的初创企业在刚刚起步时的样子。
[5] If you're building something for which you can't easily get a small set of users to observe — e.g. enterprise
software — and in a domain where you have no connections, you'll have to rely on cold calls and introductions. But
should you even be working on such an idea?
[5] 如果你正在开发的东西不容易得到一小部分用户的观察，例如企业软件，而且在一个你没有任何关系的领域，你就必须依靠冷电话和介绍。但是，你是否应该为这样的想法而努力呢？
[6] Garry Tan pointed out an interesting trap founders fall into in the beginning. They want so much to seem big that
they imitate even the flaws of big companies, like indifference to individual users. This seems to them more
"professional." Actually it's better to embrace the fact that you're small and use whatever advantages that brings.
[6] Garry Tan 指出了创始人在创业初期会陷入的一个有趣陷阱。他们太想让自己看起来很大，甚至模仿大公司的缺点，比如对个人用户漠不关心。在他们看来，这似乎更 "专业"。其实，最好的办法是接受自己是小公司的事实，并利用这一点带来的任何优势。
[7] Your user model almost couldn't be perfectly accurate, because users' needs often change in response to what you
build for them. Build them a microcomputer, and suddenly they need to run spreadsheets on it, because the arrival of
your new microcomputer causes someone to invent the spreadsheet.
[7] 你的用户模型几乎不可能完全准确，因为用户的需求往往会随着你为他们制造的产品而改变。如果你为他们制造了一台微型计算机，而他们突然需要在这台计算机上运行电子表格，因为你的新微型计算机的出现导致有人发明了电子表格。
[8] If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and those that will pay the most, it's usually
best to pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters. They'll have a better influence on your product,
and they won't make you expend as much effort on sales. And though they have less money, you don't need that much to
maintain your target growth rate early on.
[8] 如果你必须在注册最快的用户群和付费最多的用户群之间做出选择，通常最好选择前者，因为他们可能是早期用户。他们会对你的产品产生更好的影响，也不会让你为销售花费太多精力。虽然他们的资金较少，但你并不需要那么多资金来维持早期的目标增长率。
[9] Yes, I can imagine cases where you could end up making something that was really only useful for one user. But
those are usually obvious, even to inexperienced founders. So if it's not obvious you'd be making something for a market
of one, don't worry about that danger.
[9] 是的，我可以想象，在某些情况下，你可能最终只能做出对一个用户真正有用的东西。但这些情况通常是显而易见的，即使对缺乏经验的创始人来说也是如此。所以，如果你做的东西并不明显是为了一个人的市场，就不要担心这种危险。
[10] There may even be an inverse correlation between launch magnitude and success. The only launches I remember are
famous flops like the Segway and Google Wave. Wave is a particularly alarming example, because I think it was actually a
great idea that was killed partly by its overdone launch.
[10] 发射规模与成功之间甚至可能存在反比关系。在我的记忆中，只有赛格威（Segway）和谷歌浪潮（Google Wave）等著名的失败案例。Wave 是一个特别令人担忧的例子，因为我认为它实际上是一个伟大的创意，但却因为过度的发布而部分夭折。
[11] Google grew big on the back of Yahoo, but that wasn't a partnership. Yahoo was their customer.
[11]谷歌依靠雅虎发展壮大，但这并不是一种合作关系。雅虎是他们的客户。
[12] It will also remind founders that an idea where the second component is empty — an idea where there is nothing
you can do to get going, e.g. because you have no way to find users to recruit manually — is probably a bad idea, at
least for those founders.
[12] 它还会提醒创始人，如果一个想法的第二部分是空的--一个你无从下手的想法，例如，因为你没有办法找到用户进行人工招募--很可能是个坏主意，至少对这些创始人来说是这样。
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Kevin Hale, Steven Levy, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston,
and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.
感谢 Sam Altman、Paul Buchheit、Patrick Collison、Kevin Hale、Steven Levy、Jessica Livingston、Geoff Ralston 和 Garry Tan 阅读本文草稿。
