📈 Do The Unscalable

💳 Stripe & The Collison Install

Stripe, the global online payment processor, is founded by two brothers. Patrick & John.

In the company’s early days, the brothers would personally help their users integrate the system.

There is an early story about the Collison brothers building Stripe, where they were talking to other entrepreneurs in Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and an entrepreneur would say “We need to get payments figured out, we haven’t done that yet.”

And the brothers would literally get their laptops out on the spot and be like “We can help you with that right now!” And install Stripe to their site right then & there.

Patrick & John’s hands-on approach became a memorable one, so much so, that they’ve called it The Collison Install.

The Collisons were in the trenches, directly setting up the software for their customers. This process has helped them learn rapidly, iterate effectively, and also build a loyal client-base from the get-go.

🔑 Key Take Away

Don't shy away from unscalable efforts.

📈 Do The Unscalable

Entrepreneurs get obsessed with scalability.

> How do I automate this?
> How do I remove myself from the process?
> How do I make money passively?

But if you’re still in startup mode, scaling too soon is a mistake.

Therefore I want to encourage you to start regardless of it being scalable or not.

You need to build a solid base and understand your customers deeply now. And figuring out a way to make it scalable later.

Because if you incorrectly build your business’ foundation, it will easily tip over once it gets bigger.

👞 Action Step

Start doing that thing you’re avoiding because “it’s unscalable.”

📖 Book Bit

The trick is to do things that don’t scale—until you can't anymore."

Do Things That Don’t Scale - Paul Graham

🌟 Epiphany

If you’re too focused on scaling from day one, you might never reach the point where scaling even matters.