How long should founders personally do manual work that doesn't scale?

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

The biggest lesson from founding a startup is an ownership mentality: since there is no one else, you must personally do everything required.

A startup begins with nothing but a big vision, and getting from nothing to that vision requires the founders to do all of it themselves at the beginning.

Scope: especially in the earliest days

5:57 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Sanjit Biswas · Dec 8, 2023

Willingness to brute-force unscalable manual work has repeatedly been the unlock in his projects and companies

Scarce resources force you to find a way; the high school roster typed from a yearbook and installing antennas on roofs for Roofnet both built the platform when nothing else would

Scope: drawn from early-stage projects with no money

5:39 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara

Harry Stebbings · Sep 13, 2024 · hedged

In the zero-to-one phase of a company, brute force effort is really important

He slept in the office when he started, in the Elon Musk mold

Scope: specific to zero-to-one stage

55:26 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Founders should be shameless and manually DM or email their entire personal network to boost a launch

Launches need a big initial boost for the algorithms to care, and any founder who has raised money already has thousands of reachable contacts in Gmail, Twitter and LinkedIn

Scope: rebuttal to founders who say this only works with a big team and famous investors

26:15 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Harry Stebbings · May 23, 2025

Founders are far too nervous to ask for help and to do unscalable manual work like personally DMing every follower to cross-promote channels

He personally DM'd his first 50,000 Twitter followers to cross-advertise the newsletter and that is how it reached several hundred thousand subscribers

27:01 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Cliff Weitzman · May 9, 2026

Founders underrate the sheer number of product iterations required, and the way to get them is direct high-friction founder contact with users

He watched Stanford users click the wrong buttons with duct tape over his mouth, routed the in-app help button to his personal iMessage, and personally called every churned user — painful but it surfaced the real problems

79:25 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

The way to scale a consumer product to its first thousand users is to talk directly to users and iterate on their feedback at each order of magnitude — 10, then 100, then 1,000.

Direct early feedback from passionate users compounds product quality fast; giving traders a week of early access to fomo's web app roughly doubled how good it was, with no payment or strings attached.

Scope: Paul notes crypto/on-chain users are unusually passionate, which he treats as a competitive advantage

7:49 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

Sanjit Biswas · Dec 8, 2023

At some point the founder must stop doing the unscalable hands-on work because they become the bottleneck, and turning it into a scalable process is the key unlock for the next stage

Continuing to do it yourself slows the company down; scaling requires 10x-ing and then 10x-ing again

6:38 Stop once the founder becomes the bottleneck