Nail it and Scale it
For those of us working in successful internet businesses, there’s a well-understood dynamic that the marginal cost of a new user or client increasingly approaches (but never hits) zero.
With that as a backdrop to the unit economics of SaaS, it’s no surprise that these businesses might become obsessed with the idea of scalability. And it makes sense—with production costs relatively fixed (write once, sell many) why not just dial it up to 11 and keep running?
This thinking permeates organisations. I’m certainly not arguing that it’s the wrong approach, but if we’re not careful the thinking can be dogmatic and blinding to how we might want to start projects or approach delivering certain outcomes.
As Peter Drucker put it so eloquently:
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that should not have been done at all”
In the context of customer success, scaling typically means leveraged work that efficiently impacts more customers/users for a given input.
With that idea, this article started life as an overly self-indulgent review on how I personally challenged the idea of making sure everything scaled first, replete with examples and suggestions on why you should do the same.
Thankfully, that patronising mess is gone and left is this 100 word premise, without the 1000 words of self-indulgent filler.
So here’s the lesson:
It's important that efficacy is the primary focus before scale becomes a major consideration. In most cases, it’s best to start with doing things that don’t scale, rather than prematurely optimising.
How do you do that?
- Take a first principles approach. Clear preconceived notions.
- Use data to ruthlessly prioritise activities and tests
- Roll up your sleeves and do things manually
- Measure and learn
- Systematise and scale
To take the words straight from Senior Director of Customer Success, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, Stephanie Berner: Nail it and scale it.
That might be easier said than done, but the effort is worth it.