Delight: Be Insanely Attentive
Take extraordinary, almost excessive care of your early users. Wufoo sent hand-written thank-you notes to every new signup.
Founders skip this for three reasons: engineering training rewards building robust systems, not pampering individuals; it 'won't scale'; and they've never received that level of service themselves so they don't imagine giving it.
Being small is precisely the advantage: you can deliver attention no big company can match. PG has never once seen a startup hurt by trying too hard to make early users happy. And early delight becomes cultural DNA that persists at scale.
“I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy.”
Key idea
Over-serving early users is never the mistake. Small size lets you deliver a level of care incumbents can't, and it hardens into culture.