The Specific 008: Do Things That Don't Scale - 2022 Nov
🙅🏻⚖️
Originally, I wanted to do a recurring series of examples of people and companies doing things that don’t scale. And this would have been the first in the series that I send out during my December break after my issue 10 is published.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t crack issue 8 and 9 despite writing a couple of drafts for each and getting feedback for them.
So, I have moved this up to be my issue 8 instead.
Things happened. 🤷🏻♂️
Hope you enjoy this and let me know your personal favorites of people and companies Do Things That Don’t Scale. I hope to feature more such examples in future list of this series. They don’t have to be tech or business related.
I aim to publish a Do Things That Don’t Scale list every quarter or so.
The OG example
In the original article about doing things that don’t scale, Paul Graham used multiple examples. He started off with Airbnb as an example.
In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings. When I remember the Airbnbs during YC, I picture them with rolly bags, because when they showed up for tuesday dinners they'd always just flown back from somewhere.
— as written by Paul Graham here
Moving onto Wufoo’s handwritten thank you notes
For as long as they could (which turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them.
— as written here
And early Facebook maintaining course list
When I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School, he said that while it was a lot of work creating course lists for each school, doing that made students feel the site was their natural home.
— as written here
And Meraki assembling routers themselves by hand
we call "pulling a Meraki." Although we didn't fund Meraki, the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, so we know their history. They got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves.
— as written here
Which Pebble also did.
I'd advise startups to pull a Meraki initially if they can. That's what Pebble did. The Pebbles assembled the first several hundred watches themselves.
— as written here
Consulting is similar. But, make sure not to do it for money. Else, the customers will expect you to do everything.
Consulting is the canonical example of work that doesn't scale. But (like other ways of bestowing one's favors liberally) it's safe to do it so long as you're not being paid to. That's where companies cross the line. So long as you're a product company that's merely being extra attentive to a customer, they're very grateful even if you don't solve all their problems. But when they start paying you specifically for that attentiveness — when they start paying you by the hour — they expect you to do everything.
— as written here
Viaweb did something similar to free consulting.
When we approached merchants asking if they wanted to use our software to make online stores, some said no, but they'd let us make one for them. Since we would do anything to get users, we did. We felt pretty lame at the time. Instead of organizing big strategic e-commerce partnerships, we were trying to sell luggage and pens and men's shirts. But in retrospect it was exactly the right thing to do, because it taught us how it would feel to merchants to use our software. Sometimes the feedback loop was near instantaneous: in the middle of building some merchant's site I'd find I needed a feature we didn't have, so I'd spend a couple hours implementing it and then resume building the site.
— as written here
A typical pattern is to do it like Wizard of Oz or “Flintstoning”. Like this early Stripe example
For example, the way Stripe delivered "instant" merchant accounts to its first users was that the founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant accounts behind the scenes.
— as written here
Justin Welsh Manually Transfers Subscribers From Revue to his Email Newsletter
One way I try to get subscribers is to collect them from my Twitter profile which only allows Revue. Then, I manually transfer the list every week into my Substack. So does Justin Welsh.
Each Saturday morning I export my Revue subscribers into Kajabi before my newsletter goes out.
— as written here
If that’s something you’re interested in, I wrote a how to, along with videos over here.
Gergely Orosz Manually Crossposts on Twitter and Mastodon
Since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, some people started hedging by crossposting on both Mastodon and Twitter. One of them is Gergely Orosz, who writes the hugely popular Pragmatic Engineer newsletter.
I assumed him being an engineer and all that he must be using some software to allow him to crosspost so I asked him. Nope, he manually crossposts using Cmd+C, Cmd+V.
Got examples you want me to cover in the next edition of Do Things That Don’t Scale? Tell me. I read all emails.
Hopefully, I’ll crack the issues that were bugging me in the current draft by next week. See you!