This is helpful advice for how to treat your first few users. As for where to find them, the advice is "don't worry if this method won't scale" and "identify a core/goal user group". What I hoped to learn, and expected to find with this article title, is: how to identify this core group, and how to reach them?

(The Quibb example seems to explain how she made sure the early users would enjoy it, but not how she identified or found them.)

I won't speak for Sandy, but Quibb's not (necessarily) built with the startup niche in mind. She knew the most likely people to try a work linksharing tool would be tech/startup workers, so she focused on the path of least resistance. As to how she found them and reached them, it was mining her network for a strong first group of users, and tons of emails, coffees, and follow up.

To me the useful lesson of Quibb's first 1k is that your earliest users may not look like exactly like your target market, but need to be the most likely to adopt and provide useful feedback. Especially in B2C, this is likely some subset of the tech early adopter archetype.

I've noticed lots of articles where people give the same advice: Don't worry if your plan isn't scalable at first.

Is this really a problem? Do that many founders throw out an idea because it won't scale?

The advice in this article isn't "don't worry if your plan [or product] isn't scalable." It's "getting your first 1,000 users is usually not a scalable process."

The idea is that you need to do some serious legwork, and involve high-touch, high-response tactics to nurture and cultivate your early userbase. You're tending to every plant in the garden, personally, by hand. That's not a scalable process, but it can be necessary before being able to transition into scale mode.

This advice is offered in opposition to the "build it and they will come" approach, in which you build a product, throw in a few theoretical viral loops and growth-hack mechanics, maybe go for a bit of PR pickup, and then assume the product will achieve scale on its own.

A lot of growth plots don't start off linear or exponential. They start off with a few staircases.

I believe that it truly is a problem - specifically with respect to scalable marketing and especially if the founders are engineers with a great dislike of anything marketing related (yours truly included).

We like to believe that once we launch and get a handful of users, the viral effect will take place and bada-bing bada-boom we will have a million users. Movies like social network make it look like Facebook reached its first million users drinking and coding 24/7 (I still love that movie) - but the truth is that you have to put the effort in building relationships with your users and there is no scalable way to do that.

I can relate. Building the website is fun. Promoting it takes a massive effort, and can make you feel like a sleazy door-to-door salesperson.

I feel the same way applying for jobs.

Fortunately there are those of us who love that part:) (minus the sleazy stuff)

If the idea doesn't scale it could be a problem, especially if your revenue model is based on scaling or if you're planning on raising money.

I think the sentiment you're referring to is mostly "my idea scales but my prototype doesn't - I can't ship before my prototype scales!" and commenters saying don't let that stop you. That's definitely a mental hurdle to get over but a much more fixable problem.

Some good points, but they make an assumption that you already know where those consumers hang out. Easier said than done identifying them.

If you have no idea where potential consumers of your product might be, you shouldn't even start building something to target them.

Not sure why you are getting down voted. It's true. If you are trying to get people to use your product, your best bet is to start with the people you validated against. Have them help you in this regard. If you don't have those people, you are effectively doing things backwards.

So don't make a product without knowing the potential user base first?

Otherwise, you are making something for no one.

You should. Just don't expect to make money off it.

Correct.

To the downvoter(s): this comment seems like a rude quip for its own sake but if you think about the reasoning behind it I believe you'll somewhat agree.

It's not intended as being rude, I was going for succinct

It's sometimes hard to tell! I had to read it twice, but then I thought, "well that's not rude, that's quite profound". I guess whoever downvoted didn't read it the second time. It was a good comment, I voted it up.