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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]在Y Combinator，我们经常给出的建议之一就是做一些不可扩展的事情。很多潜在的创始人都认为创业公司要么起飞，要么失败。你构建了一些东西，让它可用，如果你做出了更好的捕鼠器，人们会按照承诺来找你。或者他们不会，那就意味着市场不存在。[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.
实际上，创业公司之所以起飞，是因为创始人让它们起飞。可能有一小部分公司是自己发展壮大的，但通常需要某种推动才能让它们起步。一个很好的比喻是汽车引擎在有电动启动器之前所使用的曲柄。一旦引擎启动了，它就会持续运转，但启动它需要一个单独而费力的过程。
Recruit 招聘
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.
创始人在创业初期最常见的无法扩展的事情就是手动招募用户。几乎所有的创业公司都必须这样做。你不能等待用户来找你，你必须主动出击，去争取他们。
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公司之一，而且他们解决的问题是非常紧迫的。如果有人可以坐下来等待用户的话，那肯定是Stripe。但事实上，他们在YC内因为积极主动地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.
为其他初创企业构建产品的初创公司在我们资助的其他公司中有着大量潜在用户，而Stripe对此利用得最好。在YC，我们使用“Collison安装”这个术语来形容他们发明的技术。较为谦逊的创始人会问：“你愿意试用我们的测试版吗？”如果答案是肯定的，他们会说：“太好了，我们会给你发送一个链接。”但是Collison兄弟不愿等待。当有人同意试用Stripe时，他们会说：“那好，把你的笔记本电脑给我”，然后立即为他们安装设置。
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]创始人抵制个别招募用户的原因有两个。一个是害羞和懒惰的结合体。他们宁愿坐在家里写代码，也不愿意出去和一群陌生人交谈，而且很可能会被大多数人拒绝。但是，要使初创公司成功，至少一个创始人（通常是CEO）将不得不花费大量时间在销售和市场营销上。[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，一开始绝对数字看起来很小。他们认为这不可能是大型知名创业公司的起点。他们犯的错误是低估了复利增长的力量。我们鼓励每个创业公司通过每周增长率来衡量他们的进展。如果你有100个用户，下周需要再增加10个用户，以实现每周10%的增长。虽然110个用户可能看起来并不比100个用户好多少，但如果你每周保持10%的增长率，你会惊讶地发现数字会变得多么庞大。一年后，你将拥有14,000个用户，两年后将拥有2百万个用户。
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]当你一次获得一千个用户时，你会做不同的事情，而且增长最终会放缓。但是，如果市场存在，通常可以先手动招募用户，然后逐渐转向更少手动的方法。[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是这种技术的一个典型例子。市场平台很难启动，所以你应该预计要采取英勇的措施。在Airbnb的情况下，这些措施包括在纽约挨家挨户地招募新用户，并帮助现有用户改善他们的房源信息。当我回忆起Airbnb在Y Combinator期间的情景时，我会想象他们带着滚动行李箱，因为当他们出现在周二的晚餐上时，他们总是刚从某个地方飞回来。
Fragile 易碎
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.
Airbnb现在看起来像是一股不可阻挡的巨人，但早期它是如此脆弱，以至于花费大约30天时间与用户面对面的互动，决定了成功与失败的分水岭。
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."
那种最初的脆弱并不是Airbnb独有的特点。几乎所有的初创公司最初都是脆弱的。这是经验不足的创始人、投资者（以及记者和论坛上的自以为是者）对它们的最大误解之一。他们下意识地用已经建立起来的公司的标准来评判刚刚起步的初创公司。就像有人看着一个新生婴儿然后得出结论：“这个小小的生物怎么可能取得任何成就呢？”
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]如果记者和自以为是的人对你的创业公司不屑一顾，那没什么大不了的。他们总是搞错事情。就算投资者对你的创业公司不屑一顾，也没关系；当他们看到公司的增长时，他们会改变主意的。真正危险的是你自己对自己的创业公司不屑一顾。我见过这种情况发生。我经常要鼓励那些没有看到他们所建立的东西的全部潜力的创始人。就连比尔·盖茨也犯过这个错误。他在创办微软后还回到哈佛大学读秋季学期。他没有待很久，但如果他意识到微软会变得如此庞大，他根本就不会回去。[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.
对于初创企业来说，要问的问题不是“这家公司会统治世界吗？”而是“如果创始人做对了事情，这家公司能有多大？”而且在当时，这些正确的事情通常看起来既费力又微不足道。当微软只是在阿尔布开尔基有几个人为几千个业余爱好者（当时称为如此）编写Basic解释器时，它可能并不令人印象深刻，但回顾起来，这是主导微型计算机软件的最佳路径。我知道布莱恩·切斯基（Brian Chesky）和乔·格比亚（Joe Gebbia）在为他们的第一批房东拍“专业”照片时并没有觉得自己正在走向大时代。他们只是在努力生存。但回顾起来，这也是主导一个大市场的最佳路径。
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]你如何手动招募用户？如果你构建了一些解决自己问题的东西，那么你只需要找到你的同行，这通常很简单。否则，你就需要更加刻意地努力去找到最有潜力的用户群体。通常的做法是通过进行相对不具针对性的推出来获得一些最初的用户，然后观察哪种类型的用户最热情，并寻找更多类似的用户。例如，本·西尔伯曼注意到最早的Pinterest用户中有很多对设计感兴趣，所以他去了一个设计博主的会议来招募用户，效果很好。[5]
Delight 喜悦
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.
你应该采取非凡的措施，不仅仅是为了获得用户，还要让他们感到满意。Wufoo曾经（出人意料地）给每个新用户都寄去一封手写的感谢信，这样持续了很长一段时间。你的第一批用户应该觉得选择注册你的服务是他们做过的最好的决定之一。而你也应该绞尽脑汁，想出新的方法来让他们感到愉悦。
Why do we have to teach startups this? Why is it counterintuitive for founders? Three reasons, I think.
为什么我们要教创业公司这个？为什么对创始人来说这是违反直觉的？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.
一方面，很多初创企业的创始人都接受过工程师的培训，而客户服务并不是工程师培训的一部分。你的任务是构建稳健而优雅的产品，而不是像销售人员那样对个别用户过分关注。具有讽刺意味的是，工程学传统上不喜欢过多地照顾用户的原因之一是，这些传统来自于工程师的权力较小的时代——当时他们只负责自己狭窄的领域，而不是整个项目的运营。当你是斯科蒂时，你可以任性一些，但当你是柯克时就不行了。
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.
创始人们不够关注个别客户的另一个原因是他们担心这样做无法扩展。但是当初创阶段的创始人们担心这个问题时，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，如果他们尽力让现有用户感到非常满意，总有一天他们会有太多的用户需要服务。那将是一个很好的问题。试试看能否实现这一点。顺便说一句，当这种情况发生时，你会发现让客户感到愉快比你预期的扩展得更好。部分原因是因为通常你可以找到比预测更多的扩展方法，部分原因是因为让客户感到愉快将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.
我从来没有见过一家初创公司因为过于努力让初始用户满意而走进死胡同。
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]但也许最大的阻碍创始人意识到他们可以对用户多么关注的事情是，他们从未亲身体验过这种关注。他们对客户服务的标准是由他们曾经是顾客的那些公司设定的，这些公司大多是大公司。蒂姆·库克在你购买笔记本电脑后不会给你写一封手写便条。他不能。但你可以。这是小公司的一个优势：你可以提供大公司无法提供的服务水平。[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，思考如何尽可能让用户满意，会变得非常有趣。
Experience 经验
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.
我在努力想一个词组来表达你对用户的关注应该有多么极致，然后我意识到史蒂夫·乔布斯已经做到了：疯狂地伟大。史蒂夫并不只是把"疯狂"当作"非常"的同义词，他更字面地意味着，一个人应该将执行质量的关注度提升到在日常生活中会被视为病态的程度。
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.
我们资助的所有最成功的初创公司都有这一点，这可能不会让有意创业的人感到惊讶。新手创业者不明白的是，在一个初创公司中，什么是“疯狂地优秀”。当史蒂夫·乔布斯开始使用这个词语时，苹果已经是一家成熟的公司了。他指的是Mac（以及它的文档甚至包装——这就是痴迷的本质）应该被疯狂地设计和制造。对于工程师来说，这并不难理解。这只是设计一个强大而优雅的产品的更极端版本。
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.
创始人们很难理解的是（甚至史蒂夫自己可能也很难理解）在将时间滑块滚回到初创公司的前几个月时，什么是“疯狂伟大”的变化。疯狂伟大不是指产品本身，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，产品必然是主导因素。但是，如果你通过关注细节来弥补不完整、有缺陷的早期产品，你可以并且应该给用户提供一个疯狂伟大的体验。
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]可以，也许可以，但是应该吗？是的。与早期用户进行过度互动不仅是获取增长的一种可行技术，对于大多数成功的初创公司来说，这是使产品变得优秀的反馈循环的必要部分。制造一个更好的捕鼠器不是一个原子操作。即使你像大多数成功的初创公司一样，从构建自己需要的东西开始，你构建的第一件东西也永远不会完全正确。除非在犯错误有很大惩罚的领域，通常最好不要一开始就追求完美。特别是在软件领域，通常最好在它具有一定实用性时尽快让用户接触到它，然后看看他们如何使用。完美主义常常是拖延的借口，而且无论如何，你对用户的最初模型总是不准确的，即使你是其中之一。[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.
与最早的用户直接互动所获得的反馈将是你所能得到的最好的反馈。当你变得如此庞大，不得不依赖焦点小组时，你会希望能够去用户的家和办公室观察他们使用你的产品，就像在只有少数几个用户时那样。
Fire 火
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.
有时候，正确的不可攀登的诀窍是专注于一个有意狭窄的市场。就像一开始将火控制在一个地方，让它变得非常炽热，然后再添加更多的木柴。
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.
这就是Facebook所做的。起初它只是为哈佛大学的学生而设的。在那种形式下，它只有几千人的潜在市场，但因为他们觉得它真的是为他们而设的，他们中的大多数人都注册了。在Facebook不再只为哈佛大学的学生而设之后，它在特定学院的学生中仍然保持了一段时间。当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是一项很大的工作，但这样做让学生们感觉这个网站是他们的天然家园。
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]通常情况下，任何可以被描述为市场的初创企业都需要从市场的一个子集开始，但这对其他初创企业也适用。值得一提的是，是否有一个市场的子集，你可以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.
大多数使用封闭式火种策略的初创公司都是无意识地这么做的。他们为自己和朋友们构建了一些东西，这些朋友碰巧是早期采用者，后来才意识到他们可以将其提供给更广泛的市场。如果你无意识地这么做，这个策略同样有效。对于那些天真地丢弃其中一部分的人来说，不自觉地意识到这种模式的最大危险就在于此。例如，如果你不为自己和朋友们构建一些东西，或者即使你这么做了，但你来自企业界，而你的朋友们并不是早期采用者，那么你将不再拥有一个完美的初始市场摆在你面前。
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企业。他们天生更加开放于新事物，而且因为刚刚开始，他们还没有做出所有的选择。此外，当他们成功时，他们会快速成长，你也会随之成长。这是 YC 模式（特别是使 YC 规模化）的许多意想不到的优势之一，B2B 初创企业现在有了一个立即可用的市场，其中包括数百家其他初创企业。
Meraki 梅拉奇
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.
对于硬件初创公司来说，有一种不追求规模的做事方式，我们称之为“拉动梅拉基”。虽然我们没有资助梅拉基，但创始人是罗伯特·莫里斯的研究生，所以我们了解他们的历史。他们开始时做了一些真的不适合规模化的事情：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.
硬件初创公司面临着软件初创公司所没有的障碍。工厂生产批量的最低订单通常是几十万美元。这可能让你陷入两难境地：没有产品，你无法产生所需的增长来筹集生产产品的资金。在硬件初创公司还需要依靠投资者提供资金的时候，你必须非常有说服力才能克服这个问题。众筹的出现（或者更准确地说是预购）在很大程度上帮了忙。但即便如此，我还是建议初创公司如果可以的话，最初先像 Meraki 公司那样做。这就是 Pebble 公司所做的。Pebble 公司自己组装了最初的几百只手表。如果他们没有经历那个阶段，当他们在 Kickstarter 上推出时，可能不会卖出价值 1000 万美元的手表。
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?
就像过分关注早期客户一样，对于硬件初创公司来说，自己制造东西也是有价值的。当你是工厂时，你可以更快地调整设计，并且你会学到一些你以前从未知道的东西。Pebble的Eric Migicovsky说他学到的其中一件事是“寻找好螺丝的价值有多大。”谁知道呢？
Consult 咨询
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]有时候我们建议B2B初创企业的创始人过度参与，选择一个用户，像顾问一样为他们构建一个专属的产品。初始用户是你的模具，不断调整直到完全满足他们的需求，通常你会发现其他用户也想要这个产品。即使用户数量不多，可能还有相邻领域的用户更多。只要你能找到一个真正需要某种产品并能满足这种需求的用户，你就有了一个创造用户需求的立足点，这对于任何初创企业来说已经足够了。[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.
咨询是一个典型的不可扩展的工作例子。但是（就像其他慷慨施舍的方式一样），只要你不是为此而被付费，那么这样做是安全的。这就是公司越过界限的地方。只要你是一家产品公司，只是对客户特别关注，即使你没有解决他们所有的问题，他们也会非常感激。但是当他们开始为你的关注付费，当他们按小时付费给你时，他们就会期望你做所有的事情。
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.
另一种招募起初不太感兴趣的用户的咨询技巧是代表他们使用你的软件。我们在Viaweb就是这样做的。当我们接触商家询问他们是否想使用我们的软件来建立在线商店时，有些人说不，但他们愿意让我们为他们建立一个。因为我们愿意为了获取用户而不惜一切代价，所以我们就这样做了。当时我们觉得有点傻。我们没有组织大型战略性的电子商务合作，而是试图销售行李箱、钢笔和男士衬衫。但回想起来，这正是正确的做法，因为它让我们知道商家使用我们的软件会有什么感受。有时候反馈循环几乎是即时的：在建设某个商家的网站时，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，然后继续建设网站。
Manual 手册
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.
有一种更极端的变体，你不仅仅使用你的软件，而是成为了你的软件。当你只有少量用户时，有时可以手动完成一些计划后自动化的任务。这样可以让你更快地启动，并且当你最终自动化自己的工作时，你会因为自己亲自操作而清楚地知道要构建什么。
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.
当手动组件看起来像软件时，这种技术开始具有恶作剧的一面。例如，Stripe以“即时”商家账户的方式向其首批用户提供服务的方式是，创始人在幕后手动为他们注册传统的商家账户。
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是手动操作的。如果你能找到有问题需要解决的人，并且你能够手动解决，那就继续这样做，直到你能够逐渐自动化瓶颈。以一种尚未自动化的方式解决用户问题可能会有点令人害怕，但比起更常见的情况——拥有尚未解决任何人问题的自动化系统——要少一些害怕。
Big
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：大规模发布。我偶尔会遇到一些创始人，他们似乎相信创业公司是弹道物体而不是动力飞机，只有在具有足够初始速度的情况下才能取得巨大成功。他们希望在8个不同的出版物上同时发布，并设定禁令。当然，最好是在星期二发布，因为他们在某个地方读到这是最佳发布日。
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]很容易看出，小规模的推出活动并不重要。想想一些成功的创业公司，你还记得它们的推出活动吗？你只需要从推出活动中获得一些最初的核心用户。几个月后你的表现如何更多地取决于你让这些用户有多开心，而不是他们的数量。[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布很重要呢？这是一种自我中心和懒惰的结合。他们认为自己所建立的东西非常棒，只要有人听说就会立即注册。而且，如果你能通过广播自己的存在来获得用户，那将会少很多工作量。但即使你所建立的东西真的很棒，获得用户始终是一个渐进的过程——部分原因是因为伟大的事物通常也是新颖的，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]合作伙伴关系通常也不起作用。对于初创公司来说，它们通常不起作用，尤其不适合作为推动增长的方式。对于经验不足的创始人来说，与大公司合作伙伴关系将是他们的突破口是一个常见的错误。六个月后，他们都会说同样的话：那比我们预期的要费力得多，而且我们几乎没有从中获得任何好处。[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.
仅仅做一些非凡的事情是不够的。你必须在最初付出非凡的努力。任何忽略了努力的策略，无论是期望通过大规模推出来吸引用户，还是依赖强大的合作伙伴，都是值得怀疑的。
Vector 矢量
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.
做一些费力不讨好的事情来开始创业的需求几乎是普遍存在的，所以也许不应该再把创业点子看作是可扩展的事物。相反，我们应该试着把它们看作是一对一对的东西，即你要建立的东西，以及最初为了让公司起步而要做的费力不讨好的事情。
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]以这种方式开始看待创业点子可能会很有趣，因为现在有两个组成部分，你可以在第二个部分上也尝试一下创意。但在大多数情况下，第二个部分通常是什么它通常是的——手动招募用户并给他们一个极好的体验——将创业公司视为向量的主要好处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，向量的两个组成部分都对你的公司的基因起到了贡献：为了开始而必须做的不可扩展的事情不仅仅是必要的恶，而且会永久地改变公司变得更好。如果你在小规模时必须积极地获取用户，那么在规模变大时你可能仍然会积极地获取用户。如果你必须自己制造硬件，或者代表用户使用你的软件，你将学到一些其他方式无法学到的东西。最重要的是，如果你在只有少数用户时就要努力取悦他们，那么当你有很多用户时你将继续这样做。
Notes 笔记
[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，爱默生从未特别提到捕鼠器。他写道：“如果一个人有好的玉米、木材、木板、猪要卖，或者能做出比其他人更好的椅子、刀具、坩埚或教堂风琴，你会发现通向他家的道路宽阔而坚实，即使它在树林中。”
[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Sam Altman提出的建议，让我明确一下。不，你不能通过雇佣别人来代替你做销售来避免自己做销售。刚开始的时候，你必须亲自做销售。后来你可以雇佣一位真正的销售人员来取代你。
[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] 这个方法有效的原因是随着你的规模变大，你的规模有助于你的增长。Patrick Collison写道：“在某个时刻，Stripe的感觉发生了明显的变化。它从我们必须推动的巨石变成了一节火车车厢，实际上有自己的动力。”
[
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种更微妙的方式之一是调整他们的雄心壮志，因为我们清楚地知道很多成功初创公司刚刚起步时的样子。
[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] 如果你正在开发一种无法轻易找到一小群用户进行观察的东西，比如企业软件，并且在一个你没有任何关系的领域，那么你将不得不依靠冷门电话和介绍。但是你真的应该在这样的想法上努力吗？
[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 指出了创始人在初期会陷入的一个有趣陷阱。他们非常希望显得很大，以至于模仿大公司的缺点，比如对个别用户的冷漠。他们认为这样更加“专业”。实际上，更好的做法是接受自己的小巧身份，并利用这带来的任何优势。
[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，因为用户的需求经常会随着你为他们构建的东西而改变。给他们建造了一台微型计算机，突然间他们就需要在上面运行电子表格，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] 如果你必须在那些最快注册的子集和那些付费最多的子集之间做出选择，通常最好选择前者，因为它们很可能是早期采用者。他们对你的产品会有更好的影响力，并且你不需要在销售上花费太多精力。虽然他们的资金较少，但在初期维持目标增长率并不需要太多资金。
[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，我可以想象出一些情况，你可能最终只为一个用户开发出一款真正有用的产品。但这些情况通常很明显，即使对于经验不足的创始人来说也是如此。所以，如果你没有明显地为一个人市场开发产品的打算，就不必担心这个危险。
[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] 发射规模和成功之间甚至可能存在着反向相关性。我记得的唯一几次发射都是像独轮车和谷歌Wave这样的著名失败案例。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很棒的想法，但却在过度推广的发射过程中被扼杀了一部分。
[11] Google grew big on the back of Yahoo, but that wasn't a partnership. Yahoo was their customer.[11] 谷歌靠着雅虎发展壮大，但那并不是一个合作伙伴关系。雅虎只是他们的客户。
[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] 这也会提醒创始人，如果一个想法的第二个组成部分是空的——也就是说，没有任何办法可以开始行动，比如因为你没有办法手动招募用户——那么这个想法可能是个糟糕的想法，至少对于那些创始人来说。
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Kevin Hale, Steven Levy, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.