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Isn't this contradicted by "do things that don't scale"? If you have a product and product market fit, I agree. But when you start out you should basically be a consultancy and build the product around the actual needs of the customer.

I'm reminded how the Airbnb guys would fly to New York and personally take photos for customers trying to rent out their location.

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They did the same thing for everyone though (until they figured out how to scale that thing). It's not wrong to do whatever you got to do to get your first couple customers but you should also be thoughtful on how it's going to impact your company. For example, our second customer wanted us to do a deep integration into their erp system to sign on for $2k/mo, instead we did an audit of their current process and saw they were doing manual imports and exports. We gave them import/export capabilities which still greatly reduced their daily manual work and has been a longstanding, heavily used feature. They're still with us and both their revenue and the account has grown over 4x.

100% agree. Don't ask customers for solutions, ask them for problems. If they knew the solution to their problems, they wouldn't have problems. They would often suggest solutions that are round-about or overly complicated.

I remember at work someone said they wanted a way to arbitrarily update a SQL table and clobber old values. After some digging I realized they just needed a task to scrape a particular page and throw it in a structured format. Of course when they did it manually they made mistakes and mismapped a bunch of fields

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