Early On, Do Things That Don’t Scale
When you start out, or your revenues are below $2 million, “scaling” is not a priority – yet. Still, I hear this all time: “I can’t do x, because it won’t scale!”. While you are still trying to achieve product-market fit, the words “but that doesn’t scale” shouldn’t ever cross your mind. You just need to attack and solve problems, irrespective of scale.
Even if that means calling every one of your first 50 customers to make sure they are successful with your product. Even if that means doing a highly manual, labor-intensive process up front. Even if that means the CEO is handling 50% of the support tickets up front.
Your primary job is to find a way to make your product fit, and to make your customers successful, or frankly you won’t be around much longer. Yes, it will cost you more to do so — you may have to overstaff, you may have to spend hours on things that suck and that you didn’t plan on doing.
But the truth is that it will take multiple iterations before you figure out what actually works and makes your customers happy and successful. Which is why it is a complete waste of time to talk about what will or will not scale up front. You don’t even know what you really need to be doing yet! Once you actually go through the iterative process and figure this out — THEN you can figure out how to scale it.
Trust me, this may be hard to see now. You may be tempted NOT to do something because you “know” right now it won’t scale. Don’t fall for it. Solve problems first, scale after. Once you know exactly what you need to do, you WILL come up with creative solutions on how to scale it. You’ll look back and be relieved that you didn’t get in your own way.
Check out this post from Paul Graham of Y Combinator how billion dollar companies like AirBnB and Stripe did things that didn’t scale early on.
About the Author Nick Friend
Nick Friend is an Entrepreneur, Investor, Husband, Father of 3 daughters. Built businesses from scratch to 8 figures, and has been nominated for several Entrepreneurship awards. Nick enjoys helping other entrepreneurs, particularly those fighting the struggle from $0-10 million.