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How Instacart's Founder Grew by Doing Things That Don't Scale

By Apoorva Mehta · Product & Building · 2 min read

Instacart's founder did something most VCs would call crazy. It worked.

Key Points

Apoorva says start small. Big things grow from tiny beginnings.
Building beats planning. Apoorva says ship fast and iterate.
Apoorva says do things that don't scale before you try to scale.
Apoorva shares hard-won wisdom most founders learn too late.

YC encourages startups to to do things unscalable I find that this is one of the biggest competitive advantages that.

Start Embarrassingly Small

Apoorva Mehta just said something every founder needs to hear.

Apoorva put it this way: "YC encourages startups to to do things unscalable I find that this is one."

Of the biggest competitive advantages that a that a startup has. Or a larger.

Company because there's no way that the larger company would be doing those things unscalable.

Of the biggest competitive advantages that a that a startup has or

Your Idea Doesn't Matter Yet

And the idea is that once your product has demand you can figure out.

How to scale your product we took this advice to a heart in.

Early days of instacart you could place orders on on on our service without there.

How to scale your product we took this advice to a heart

Cut What Doesn't Matter

Being any Shoppers to fulfill those orders of course this meant. That I would.

Drop everything I was doing and and fulfill the order myself only thing. That.

Mattered to us was how fast we were growing. And how fast we were executing.

Read that again. Apoorva isn't theorizing. This is real.

I would drop everything I was doing and and fulfill the order myself only

Create Something That Matters

One example of this was when we decided to add traded Joe's to instacart's.

Offering now there was no API or website which had the item catalog for.

For Trader Joe's so the only way we could actually get all the item information.

This is the kind of insight you don't get from business books.

Or website which had the item catalog for for Trader Joe's so the only

The Bigger Picture

Was to buy one of every single item at Trader Joe's take it.

A studio take pictures of all those things and. Then put them into our.

Catalog and so that's exactly what we did here's actually all the items being lined.

A studio take pictures of all those things and then put them

Get Obsessed With Your Customer

Up before I was taking the picture using the same unscalable techniques we we.

Added Whole Foods Costco and many other stores and we realized. That we had.

The best product in the market we were growing so fast. And our customers loved.

Read that again. Apoorva isn't theorizing. This is real.

Foods Costco and many other stores and we realized that we had the best

People Over Everything

Instacart today we're in 10 cities in the United States. And our revenue is.

Growing by 10% week over week and has been growing. That for 20 weeks.

So far as we have grown a as a company. And as a team we.

That's the whole game. Apoorva just gave you the blueprint.

Growing by 10% week over week and has been growing that for