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Y Combinator Partners on DoorDash, Instacart, and doing things that don’t scale

November 26, 2024

Apoorva Mehta’s idea for Instacart was to let users order their groceries with the tap of a button.

Some founders might’ve spent months trying to negotiate corporate partnerships with grocery stores like Trade Joe’s or Whole Foods before starting this business. But the first thing Apoorva did was test whether this was something people even wanted.

His team took their YC money, went to Trader Joe’s and bought one of every item. They then rented a photography studio, took pictures of every item, wrote down the prices, and posted it all to their website. When an order came in, they bought the item from Trader Joe’s and delivered it.

This allowed them to prove that Instacart was something customers wanted, and only once they hit scale did they negotiate partnerships with large grocery chains.

YC Partner Tom Blomfield sums up the core advantage this approach that Paul Graham advocates for in his essay Do Things That Don’t Scale:

“In the cases where you do things that don’t scale and it turns out no one wants it, that’s actually a good thing because you’ve saved yourself months or years of building something no one wants… And by doing this stuff that doesn’t scale, you can give the appearance of that service or product already existing by basically faking it manually, pulling the strings in the background, and doing tons of hard work yourself to deliver that incredible white glove experience to customers.”

YC CEO Garry Tan adds:

“Doing things that don’t scale lets you experiment, fail fast, and try new things. It lets you test your assumptions before you spend months building a product.”

YC Partners Diana Hu and Michael Seibel discuss another great example of this: DoorDash.

Even though the team was a technical group of Stanford engineering students and MBAs, they built the MVP with a tech stack of Google Drive to upload menus, a simple HTML/CSS website, a Google Form to take orders, and Find My Friends as their dispatch system to track drivers.

Diana comments:

“They could have done the fancy thing and build out a dynamic site with real-time tracking, but the founders were very pragmatic. That was not the hardest thing to prove.”

Usually the hardest thing to prove is that your product is something people want.