Don’t be afraid to do things that don’t scale.

This isn’t a new conversation, but it feels like it needs reiterating.

Time and again, we speak with businesses striving for growth, yet they're often more worried about? how ‘scalable’ their ideas and processes are.?

A common excuse for not trying something in the startup world is, “But it won’t work at scale...” In other words, if you can’t use this same process for years to come as the business grows to new heights, then it’s not worth doing.

This mindset can be a trap. Some of the most successful companies started out by doing things that wouldn’t scale:

• Deliveroo: The founder was one of the first riders.
• Airbnb: They initially hired photographers to take quality pictures of people’s homes.
• Gymshark: The founder sent 2,500 handwritten apologies with discounts to those affected by a site crash on Black Friday in 2015.
• Zappos: The founder started by uploading images of Foot Locker’s inventory to a website. When someone made an order, he bought the shoes from Foot Locker and then sent them to the customer.

Doing things that don’t scale helps to generate momentum.

In the early days, the goal is growth, not efficiency. And perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination!?

It’s not the product that needs to be amazing; it’s the experience of being your user or customer that does. Doing things that don't scale is one of your biggest competitive advantages when you're starting out, and you can worry about how to scale once you have created and captured some of that early demand.

As Paul Graham, one of the co-founders of Y Combinator, suggests; one ‘unscalable’ trick is to deliberately focus on a narrow market (your niche). Take Facebook as an example. They started at Harvard, achieved critical mass there, then spread to other Ivy League schools. Eventually, they opened up to other colleges where they had already created demand.?

“It’s like keeping a fire under control to make it really hot before adding more logs.”

In an attempt to scale, you might build things that people don’t want

You don’t need to wait until you’ve got a fully formed product to launch—doing this could mean you spend time and money building the wrong thing! The sooner you can get out into the market and start learning what get’s people excited, the better. For example, Ally Fekaiki (who we’ve had as a guest on our LinkedIn Live series a couple of times now), started Juno with just a landing page, selling the vision. He used this as a way to prove his idea was what the market needed, and used it as a way to gather feedback on exactly what people wanted to inform his roadmap.?

The key here: start small and gather data on what interests people. Start building once you know what people want.

In an attempt to scale, you might automate things that don’t work.

Let’s use the example of an onboarding email sequence, designed to activate users once they sign up for your product. Once it’s automated, it’s executed the exact same way every single time. But what if it’s not actually effective? Automating an email sequence that doesn’t work means every single lead that signs up is going to get a sequence of emails that doesn’t work…

Instead, don’t be afraid to take a more hands-on approach initially. Manually email customers, engage with them, and learn from the process. Discover what works and what doesn’t, make changes, and keep testing. Once you start to see consistent results, then shift to automation.

The same concept applies to B2B sales

Before you think about closing your 1,000th customer, you need to focus on the first 10. If you create an automated sales sequence without knowing what motivates users to sign up, you’ll just end up redoing the entire thing when you get more insight.

Each time a new lead signs up for a trial, call them. Make the random discoveries that only happen when two people actually talk to each other, that would be missed in a survey or by looking at the data your analytics tools have to offer.?

Become great, then automate or delegate

As Paul Graham says, “It’s not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You have to make an extraordinary effort initially.”

The lesson here is clear: Don’t let the fear of scaling prevent you from taking bold, unscalable actions that drive growth. The path to success often begins with doing the hard, manual work that others aren’t willing to do. Once you’ve built a strong foundation and truly understand your customers, then—and only then—should you focus on scaling.