The widely circulated phrase: “Do things that don’t scale” was coined by Paul Graham in 2013. It became my mantra at Rallybound. But it came my way of trial and error, I had only discovered the expression after the fact. I, maybe foolishly, never thought of scaling operations, sales or product systematically rather looked at those levers pragmatically. Each person, system, process, was a building block on placed as a foundation, not necessarily designed to go far and wide.
Starting with the default mindset to make something travel sets up a bad practice and expectations in the early days of building a company. To focus on speed and efficiency out of the gate, can sacrifice enduring and durable qualities that are necessary for ideas and products to stand the test of time and distance.
Paul’s themes are spot on, as are most things he’s potificated on, but I’d distill them further: get off your seat and go talk to people. From your team to customers, partners and early advocates you have to put in the time and meet new folks. Learn from conversations, put yourself out there. It takes getting comfortable with rejection, being vulnerable. I believe it’s one of the only ways to gain new, unrealized insights.
One lesson we learned on the flip side was when to step on the gas and try to create a repeatable process to “scale” = to grow, pure and simple. In the early days, I was way too sheepish on the sales front. Once we got product market fit (i.e. people we never knew, unsolicited requests to buy our software), we should have invested more in predictive sales motion. I could point to half a dozen excuses why I never double down but none would be good reasons. In this specific case, I knew in my heart the old approach wouldn’t cut it but as an organization we didn’t have the vision to take the leap. I should have been more opportunistic. I’ll never make that mistake again.
