Paul Graham’s famous essay is a reminder that early momentum is powered by hand-built experiences. You don’t win at the beginning by building perfect automation—you win by personally onboarding every user, stitching the product together by hand, and learning exactly what people want. The uncomfortable part is how lopsided the effort feels. You create bespoke features for a tiny number of customers, take calls at odd hours, and manually run processes you hope to automate later. Those deliberate imbalances are the whole point: they surface the grain of the product, show you where to simplify, and reveal who actually cares. Doing unscalable work is not a detour, it is the shortest path to something people love. Once the shape of the product is clear, you can rebuild the scaffolding in code, standardize the workflows, and make the “magic” repeatable. ---