By Larry Chiang
Big mistake = hoping that marketing will save you from doing initial sales work.
Stanford entrepreneurship is very counterintuitive in that you must initially recruit users manually. Common sense would have you think a large gob of users get you going. Initially, you must do lead generation manually.
Start recruiting users manually, nearly all the startups have to go out and onboard users
— Beverly Mbeke (@BeverlyMbeke) June 6, 2015
Pinterest is a mass consumer product but Ben Silbermann said even he began by recruiting users manually https://t.co/C4TIiyt6li @salvomizzi — Enrico (@wikipolis) June 4, 2014
Jessica on why marketing for early stage startups should be more like sales: https://t.co/tjnuCO5YQD
— Paul Graham (@paulg) June 3, 2014
“if the market exists you can … start by recruiting users manually and then … switch to less manual methods” https://t.co/oGzk5TOkSi — Mattias Hising (@hising) July 14, 2013
Sam Altman at #cs183b (Stanford Engineering CS183 b: How to start a startup)
recruiting users manually first, and then testing lots of growth strategies (ads, referral programs, sales and marketing, etc.) and doing more of what works. Ask your customers where you can find more people like them.
https://playbook.samaltman.com/
To practice what Professor Sam teaches, you should manually recruit customers as a CS major Chief Revenue Officer.
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