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Life's Pleasures Quote by Paul Graham

"We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30"

About this Quote

The line lands with the offhand confidence of someone watching demand do the marketing for them. Paul Graham isn’t bragging about clever ad copy; he’s pointing to the quiet power of distribution that’s already working. “We don’t have to go that far” isn’t laziness, it’s leverage: why burn cash and time chasing distant wins when the nearest customers are tripling volume?

The subtext is a textbook growth story told in barroom units. “Immediate accounts” frames the world as a tight radius of reliable buyers, the kind of network where reputation travels faster than sales reps. When a place goes from 10 cases to 30, it signals more than a spike. It implies repeat behavior, operational consistency, and a product that survives contact with reality. In other words: traction. And traction is the one metric that turns persuasion into arithmetic.

Calling Graham a “scientist” sharpens the intent. The quote reads like a field note from an experiment where the hypothesis is simple: if you make something people genuinely want, the system starts pulling it through on its own. The beer is almost incidental; the point is the scalable pattern. Focus on the constraints nearest to you, measure what changes, then follow the compounding. It’s a pragmatic refusal of the glamour move (expanding outward) in favor of the boring move (intensifying where signal is strongest).

Quote Details

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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Graham, Paul. (2026, January 16). We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-dont-have-to-go-that-far-to-sell-our-beer-128591/

Chicago Style
Graham, Paul. "We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-dont-have-to-go-that-far-to-sell-our-beer-128591/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-dont-have-to-go-that-far-to-sell-our-beer-128591/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.

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Paul Graham is a Scientist.

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