[kevinalexbrown]

I'd be curious to know good ways to balance these various things that don't scale. I speak from a position of inexperience, but I can't imagine a fragile startup could possibly max out any of them. Given that, what are some heuristics for allocating focus across several unscalable efforts? Put another way, what are cues to focus more on one thing than another?

[pg]

See the section labelled "Compass" here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

[rattray]

Thanks for posting this here. May even be worth mentioning in a footnote of this essay, as it provides a terrific bit of context.

[jfoster]

Imagine that airbnb got the door slammed in their faces at first. If so, they should keep trying and adapting their approach. Once some X% would convert (where X is acceptable), but they can't reach enough doors, the problem has changed, so they need to start scaling better.

[andrewcamel]

I totally agree and think this is an important line to draw. If it's anything having to do with offsetting the core unit economics of the business, I'd get worried. E.g. Not correctly determining the cost of delivery as Instacart b/c the founders do runs sometimes too.