🔍 Examples Of Doing Things That Don't Scale (3 Min Read)

"It takes 5000 videos to make a good one. " - Mr. Beast

I’ve been studying how to grow an audience on TikTok. I was hoping for some algorithmic secret, some growth hacks that require little to no effort.

But of course, the prerequisite, or maybe the most important hack of all, is posting 2–3 videos per day for at least the first couple of months.

This is the kind of unsexy stuff that you don’t want to hear, but deep down, you know it’s the thing you have to do. Quality comes from quantity. 

Today’s case study is related to this spirit.

So you want to boost your ad performance?

Here are 3 ways eComm brands can drive revenue with micro-influencers:

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3. Drive traffic and sales with influencer posting to their audience using trackable links.

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Marketing seems to be synonymous with performance marketing for the past decade.

With the instant reach and scale via Facebook, Instagram, and Google, why wouldn’t brands leverage the arbitrage for fast growth, especially if (or precisely because) they have access to funding?

But before you are equipped with any of those armers, how do you acquire the initial batch of customers? How do you know which solutions are good enough to scale?

Paul Graham’s 2013 essay “Doing Things that Don’t Scale” gives the answer in the title. He argues that sometimes, the most effective way to grow a business is to do things that don’t scale. These are things you cannot do forever, but if you don’t do them, you won’t be big anyway. You could also learn a lot in the process.

In this case study, we will show you some examples of unscalable things brands do that you can start doing right away.

This is super clever.

To promote his book (or just for fun), Nick Gray included a photo of his book in his restaurant reviews. Anyone that reads the reviews will see his book in the photo and maybe want to check it out.

Going out and manually recruiting readers like this seems like an unimaginable thing to do that would result in little impact.

Well… the fact we are featuring this in our case study and many of you might share this with others means the k-factor is already growing.

When Reddit first launched, it was a blank page with no users, no posts, and no communities, which means it was unlikely to have traffic or engagement — a classic chicken and egg problem.

Rather than sitting back and waiting for users to come, the founders created hundreds of fake profiles. Their job, in the beginning, was to use those accounts to seed the content and create the communities themselves to make the website seem active and diverse in content. They did this until other users came —  when they went from 0 to 1.

Poplight is a brand that’s still in the Kickstarter crowd-funding stage. However, in emails to their first round of supporters, they proactively ask to learn more about their future customers by offering to jump on calls with them.

Founder talking to each customer is unscalable as the brand grows big. However, in the initial stage, the invaluable learnings from these interactions could determine success or failure:

• Narrowing down and gaining a deeper understanding of the target market that’s most excited about your product
• Gaining feedback about your products to make them better for users

Glossier didn’t build its community in a vacuum.

The founder Emily Weiss mentioned that she managed Glossier’s social media accounts in the beginning. Every morning she would like, follow, and repost every account that mentioned Glossier on social media.

Community building seems like this unattainable thing that requires some grand strategy. The simple unscalable thing you can start doing today is simple as that.

In a previous case study on Beehiiv’s rocket growth, we also touched on how their team is doing an incredible job building a community on Twitter this way.

Paul Graham also noted in his essay:

"You can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness."

• Nick Gray’s clever move is what inspired this post. He also makes amazing content on how to make friends. Show him some support.
• A Reddit keyword monitoring tool I found through founder sharing in a Reddit comment (the Nick Gray move)
• Ahref is no longer a small brand but still doing good things that don’t scale.
• A Shark Tank airing guide google doc shared by the founder of Curie, who killed it on Shark Tank.
• Doing Things that Don’t Scale by Paul Graham

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Maybe I’ve listened to too many episodes of The Tim Ferris Show but…I hope the spirit moves ya!

Chi & Alex are outta here