How to Do Things That Don't Scale. Unscalable Things Explained
Why doing the “unscalable” stuff early on can launch your startup into the stratosphere. In the startup world, there's a mantra originally coined by Y Combinator’s founder Paul Graham: “Do things that don't scale.”
It sounds almost heretical. Aren’t startups supposed to be all about hockey-stick growth and building for millions of users? Yet the truth is, in their fragile first months, startups often survive and thrive because founders hustle in ways that won’t scale – and that’s exactly what kickstarts the growth later on. Think of your startup like an old car that needs a hand crank to get the engine running. Once it’s going, it can roar on its own. But first, you’ve got to crank it up manually. This article is a down-to-earth guide for founders on how and why to do those unscalable things that set the stage for explosive scalability later.
Recruit Users by Hand (yes, literally)
Every founder dreams of users beating down the door to sign up – but in reality, you’ll probably have to go out and grab your early users one by one. The most common unscalable task in a startup’s early days is manually recruiting users. Instead of waiting for visitors to magically land on your site, get out there and hustle.
This might mean personally emailing, calling, or even meeting potential users face-to-face. Take the example of Stripe. Today it’s a $92 billion online payments giant, but in its infancy the founders didn't just put up a website and hope for the best. They went out and aggressively signed up users in person. In fact, the Collison brothers (Stripe’s founders) became famous at Y Combinator for what came to be known as “Collison installations”. When someone agreed to try their payment software, they wouldn’t wait for the user to figure it out. They’d say “Great, let’s set you up right now” – sometimes literally taking the user’s laptop and installing Stripe on the spot! That level of personal touch is about as unscalable as it gets, but it won Stripe their crucial first customers.
Why do founders shy away from this hands-on approach? Often it’s a mix of shyness and laziness: it’s easier to sit at home tweaking code than risk talking to strangers who might say no. Other times it’s because manually getting a dozen users seems so paltry – “Surely the big startups didn’t start like this?” Actually, many of them did. Growth starts slow, but it compounds. Even a handful of new users each week can snowball into thousands over time. So don’t scoff at small numbers – embrace them. Your early adopters, acquired through elbow grease, are the spark that lights the fire.
Fragile Beginnings: Nurture Your Newborn Startup
In its early days, your startup is more like a newborn baby than a scaled machine. It’s fragile, delicate, and completely dependent on you. If you drop it, it could be gone for good. Many first-time founders (and even some investors) mistakenly judge a fledgling startup by the standards of an established company – like looking at a tiny infant and declaring, “Eh, this kid will never accomplish anything.” In reality, almost all startups are feeble at the start. They don’t take off by themselves; founders have to lift them off the ground.
A classic example is Airbnb. Today, Airbnb ($78B) is a household name, a sprawling global marketplace. But rewind to when Airbnb was just a scrappy idea: the founders were struggling to get traction and nearly ran out of money. How did they turn the tide? They did something utterly unscalable – literally knocking on doors. The Airbnb team flew to New York, went door-to-door to meet hosts, personally helped them photograph and list their apartments, and recruited new hosts one by one. It was exhausting work; every Tuesday during Y Combinator, the founders would show up with suitcases straight from the airport, having spent days pounding the pavement.
That effort made all the difference. Airbnb’s early trajectory was so fragile that those few weeks of hands-on hustle were the difference between success and failure. By engaging in person with users, they manually bootstrapped supply and demand in their marketplace until network effects could kick in. The lesson? Don’t dismiss your startup just because it starts small or shaky. As a founder, you have to nurse it through that fragile phase with intensive care – personal outreach, tweaks, and perseverance. Given enough love and effort, that tiny baby of a startup could grow into a giant.
Delight Your Early Users with Personal Touches
Here’s one of the best-kept secrets in startup growth: happy users stick around and bring their friends. In the beginning, you have so few users that you can afford to make each of them feel like royalty. In fact, you can’t afford not to! Go above and beyond to delight the heck out of your first users. Deliver an experience so good that they can’t help but talk about it. This often means doing unscalable, time-intensive things to make them happy.
For example, the online forms startup Wufoo literally sent a hand-written “thank you” note to every new user. Think about that: a personal thank-you card, in the mail, for signing up to a web app. Crazy? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely! Those users felt a human connection to the product. They weren’t just sign-up #55; they were valued early adopters. Your first users should feel that joining your service “was one of the best choices they ever made”. If that means personally onboarding each user, customizing the product for them, or sending them swag and thank-you notes, do it. These gestures create goodwill and loyalty that money can’t buy.
Founders often hesitate here because they worry these efforts “won’t scale.” You know what – they probably won’t, and that’s fine. If someday you’re fortunate enough to have too many users to give this level of attention, that’s a great problem to have. Early on, you have nothing to lose by lavishing attention on users. If anything, these super-fan users will become your evangelists. They’ll give you invaluable feedback and spread the word. You’re small, so use it to your advantage. Big companies simply cannot provide the personal touch a tiny startup can. Tim Cook isn’t going to send you a note after you buy a new iPhone. But you can send one to your user after they try your product. That’s your unfair advantage as a startup: to offer a level of service and caring that no big competitor would ever even attempt.
Make the Experience Insanely Great
Delighting users isn’t just a feel-good move – it’s how you hone your product. Tech legend Steve Jobs used the phrase “insanely great” to describe the desired quality of Apple’s products. As a startup founder, your product itself might not be insanely great yet (it’s likely a buggy, bare-bones MVP), but the experience of being your user can be insanely great. How? By compensating a rough product with insanely great support and attentiveness. Essentially, make your early product feel like a luxury experience through personal attention.
Spend time with your users. Onboard them personally, guide them, listen to their problems and fix what you can immediately. Obsess over the details of their experience. You might discover that just watching someone use your app (or even watching them struggle with it) gives you a dozen ideas on how to improve. In fact, the feedback you get from those early, one-on-one user interactions is pure gold – likely the best feedback you’ll ever get. Later, when you have thousands of users, you’ll long for the days when you could visit a user’s home or hop on a call and watch them use your product in real time. That tight feedback loop in the early stage will help you iterate fast and make your product great.
Remember, perfect is the enemy of good. Especially at the start. Don’t hide in your cave polishing your code for months. Get a working prototype in front of real users as soon as possible, and then work with them to make it better. Early adopters are generally forgiving as long as you’re responsive. They know they’re using an early product. Surprise them with your eagerness to help and improve. That way, even if your app is missing features or has bugs, they’ll still love being your user because you’re giving them an insanely great overall experience. That scales better than you’d think – not through manpower, but through the culture of customer obsession you’re instilling in your company.
Start with a Small, Focused Fire
In the quest for scale, it’s tempting to go broad early – to try to target everyone in hopes of catching fire. But counterintuitively, the fastest way to spread is to start in a small niche and dominate it. Think of building your startup like starting a campfire: you begin with a small, contained flame and get it burning hot before you pile on more logs.
Facebook did exactly this. It began just for Harvard students. That’s a market of maybe a few thousand people – tiny, considering Facebook now has billions of users. But by focusing on one college, Facebook made those students feel like this was built for them. It achieved critical mass in a micro-community before expanding. Only after conquering Harvard did Zuckerberg open Facebook to other colleges, one campus at a time. Each time, it felt exclusive – and that exclusivity fueled desire. As Zuckerberg later noted, doing the unscalable work of curating each college’s network (even manually adding course lists and dorm info) made students feel the site was their home. That effort wouldn’t scale long-term, but it didn’t need to – it just had to ignite the first spark.
No matter what your startup does, ask yourself: Is there a smaller sub-market or community where I can really catch fire? Maybe it’s a specific city, a niche hobby group, or a particular industry segment. Win that niche. Cater to them, learn their needs, and make your product indispensable for that group. It might feel limiting to target only a tiny slice of the market at first, but succeeding with a niche can provide the base you need to expand later. It’s much easier to go from owning a small pond to a big lake than to try to boil the ocean from day one. A small, hot fire is the start of a big one.
"Pulling a Meraki" – When Hardware Startups Go Hands-On
Software startups aren’t the only ones who should do things that don’t scale. If you’re a hardware startup, you might have to get even scrappier. There’s a term in founder circles called “pulling a Meraki,” named after a company whose founders did something extreme: they assembled their early hardware units themselves, by hand. Why? Hardware is expensive to manufacture at scale – factories demand big orders and big money. The Meraki founders couldn’t afford a huge production run at first, so they quite literally sat there soldering and assembling their wireless routers one by one.
This approach paid off. By building the first units manually, they got their product into users’ hands without insane upfront costs, learned from real-world usage, and proved demand. Later, Meraki sold to Cisco for a bundle – not bad for some hand-soldered routers! Another great example is Pebble, the smartwatch startup. Pebble’s team manually assembled the first several hundred watches in-house before they ever went to a factory. It was tedious work, but it let them tweak the design on the fly and ensure quality. That unscalable effort directly contributed to their ability to later sell $10 million worth of Pebble watches when they finally did a large-scale launch on Kickstarter. Had they tried to outsource everything from day one, they might have run out of money or built the wrong product. By doing it manually first, they learned crucial lessons (like the importance of good screws) and set themselves up for a big win.
The takeaway for hardware founders: don’t be afraid to be your early manufacturing. Build it yourself if you have to. Ship a small batch to early customers and gather feedback. Yes, it’s unscalable to be screwing together devices in your garage – but it’s often the only way to get the engine running before you can scale up production. Plus, you’ll gain a depth of product understanding that will benefit you when you do hit the assembly line.
Be Your User’s Personal Consultant
Another powerful unscalable strategy, especially for B2B startups: treat one of your first users like a VIP client – basically, become their personal consultant. Instead of trying to build a one-size-fits-all product right away, work extremely closely with one willing customer to tailor a solution just for them. Pour yourself into solving their problem, even if that means a lot of custom work. The goal is to make something one person absolutely loves, and use that as the mold for a product that many others will want.
This approach is like an apprenticeship in your own product. You learn what your customer really needs, often uncovering insights you’d never get from superficial market research. By the time you’ve made that one customer ecstatically happy, you’ll likely have a product that’s 90% ready to delight a bunch of similar customers out there. It’s easier to find more people with the same problem once you’ve nailed a solution. If you can get one user who truly needs your product and build exactly what they want, you’ve got a toehold on making something people want on a broader scale.
Now, there’s a fine line to walk here. We’re not suggesting you turn into a generic consulting firm doing whatever any client asks for money. In fact, do this work either for free or for very little, so expectations stay low. The idea is to be extra attentive to a customer as a strategy to hone your product, not to start a consulting business. If you start taking hefty fees to build custom stuff, you’ll get pulled into a million directions. But if you pick the rightearly customer – one whose needs align with a larger market – the effort you spend making them happy will pay off in a product that many others will pay for. They get an amazing, bespoke solution; you get to craft your product with real-world guidance. It’s win-win.
For example, the founders of Viaweb (an early online store builder) went door-to-door to small shops trying to sell their web storefront software. Some shop owners weren’t interested in using the software themselves, but said, “If you guys set up the online store for me, sure.” So the Viaweb team literally became web designers for those few customers – they manually built online stores for a handful of local businesses, populating products and all. It felt like a tangent (why are we selling stuff like a clerk instead of building our software?!), but it turned out to be exactly what they needed. By acting as the service provider briefly, they learned what features merchants needed and quickly improved their product. In one case, while building a client’s site, they realized the software lacked a certain feature – so they paused, coded that feature into the product, deployed an update, and then resumed building the site with the new capability. Talk about rapid iteration! That unscalable deep dive gave them insight and conviction that made Viaweb a better platform for all users later.
Do the Manual Work Behind the Curtain
There’s an even more extreme flavor of “doing the unscalable”: doing things manually that you eventually plan to automate, while making it look automated to the user. Think Wizard of Oz – the great and powerful wizard was just a guy behind a curtain pulling levers. In startup terms, sometimes you are the human behind the curtain, doing tasks by hand that your software will eventually do.
Plenty of successful startups began this way. In Stripe’s early days, they promised new users “instant” merchant accounts to accept payments. How did they deliver on that when setting up a merchant account normally took a while? Simple – the founders manually set up each account on the backend, fast, so from the user’s perspective it was instant. It was a bit of a magic trick, but it worked. They didn’t have all the banking integrations fully automated yet, but they didn’t wait for perfect automation to start onboarding customers.
If your product needs some complex process, ask yourself: Can we just do this manually for now? You might be surprised how often the answer is yes. Maybe you run a marketplace that requires vetting providers – you (the founders) can do the vetting calls yourself initially. Or you offer an AI-based editing service – maybe in the early days, a human team member secretly polishes some of the output by hand. It sounds like cheating, but it’s really just hustling. You’re doing whatever it takes to solve the user’s problem now, and worrying about scaling the solution later.
This approach lets you launch sooner and learn faster. Instead of spending six months coding a complex automation system, you can start serving customers in one month by doing parts of it manually. As you grow, you’ll identify which manual tasks are the biggest bottlenecks and automate those first. Over time, piece by piece, you transition from human-powered to software-powered. By the end, you have the efficient system you envisioned – and a business full of happy customers you acquired along the way. Yes, it feels a little scrappy to be the “human API” for your company, but if it delivers value to users, it’s completely fair game in a startup.
Don’t Rely on the Big Launch or "Magic" Partnerships
A mistake many new founders make is overestimating the splashy launch or the big-name partnership. It’s easy to think success will come if you can just land a feature in TechCrunch, or get Microsoft/Google/[Insert BigCo] to partner with you. Reality check: that’s not what makes a startup successful in the long run. Launch PR and partnerships can be mildly helpful at best, and distracting at worst.
Think about it – how many huge startup launch events do you vividly remember? Probably not many. The truth is, launches are just a starting point, not a victory lap. You might get a spike of signups from a launch announcement, but a month later what matters is how many of those people are still using and loving your product. All you need from a launch is a small core of users. It doesn’t matter if they came from a big splash or a slow trickle – what matters is that you make those users happy. If you do, they’ll stick around and tell others. If you don’t, no press coverage can save you.
The same goes for early partnerships. Founders often chase a deal with a big company thinking it’ll be their ticket to scale – like, “If only BigCo integrates our product or resells it, we’ll hit millions of users overnight.” In practice, these deals almost never live up to the hype. They take forever to negotiate and implement, and six months later you usually end up saying, “That was way more work than we expected for almost no payoff.”
Big companies move slowly, and their incentives rarely line up with lending rocket fuel to a tiny startup. By the time a partnership might bear fruit, you could have manually acquired a thousand more users on your own.
So, instead of banking on a mythical “big break,” bank on your own hustle. Organic, steady growth beat flashy one-time boosts in the long run. The founders who win are those willing to grind it out – recruiting users one by one and keeping them happy – not those waiting around for a miracle viral hit or a corporate knight in shining armor. As a rule of thumb, if a growth strategy sounds like you get users without having to work hard for them, be skeptical. There’s no such thing as a free user base. Roll up your sleeves and start courting users the old-fashioned way.
Your Idea = Product + Hustle
Here’s a new way to frame your startup idea: imagine it as two parts – the awesome product or service you’re building, plus the unscalable hustle you’ll do to get it off the ground. Stop thinking of startup ideas as a single thing and instead think of them as a combination of what you’ll build and how you’ll get users initially. In math terms, it’s a vector: it has both magnitude and direction.
Why is this helpful? Because it forces you, the founder, to plan for that second component from the start. It’s not enough to say, “We’re going to revolutionize online shopping with this app” – you also need to say, “At the beginning, we’re going to personally sign up the first 100 boutique sellers in our city by visiting them in person,” or whatever your unscalable plan is. Thinking this way ensures you’re not just dreaming about what to build, but also how to get it flying.
In most cases, the exact unscalable tactics will look similar: you’ll manually recruit users and give them an overwhelmingly great experience. That’s the tried-and-true formula we’ve been discussing. But by explicitly plotting it out as part of your idea, you acknowledge that a huge part of your startup’s success is going to come from the grind, not just the idea or code. It reminds you that early growth is not automatic – you have to drag your company up that hill yourself before momentum takes over.
The beautiful irony is that doing these hard things that don’t scale actually sets your company up to scale better later. They become part of your company’s DNA. If you, as a tiny startup, learn to be aggressive in user acquisition, you’ll carry that growth mindset forward. If you bend over backwards to please users when you have 10 of them, you’ll build a culture of user happiness that will still delight people when you have 10,000. If you physically assembled your first products, you now deeply understand your supply chain, which will help when you’re mass-producing. These initial hustles aren’t just a means to an end; they shape your team’s values and know-how. Work hard in those two dimensions – product and hustle – and you’ll create a startup that’s not only growing, but growing in the right way.
Conclusion: Hustle Now, Scale Later
Building a startup is a bit of a paradox. In order to eventually grow big and operate efficiently, you often have to do things in the early days that are inefficient and decidedly not big. Every founder hears about “scale” and dreams of the day their creation serves millions. But the path to that scalable success is paved with unscalable steps. By doing things that don’t scale – recruiting users manually, catering to them personally, focusing on a niche, jury-rigging solutions, and going above and beyond – you set in motion the forces that will scale. It’s how you crank the engine until it can run on its own.
Be the founder who personally emails 500 users, not the one waiting for 50,000 users to magically appear. Spend time onboarding a customer or fine-tuning a feature for a single client. These may not scale, but they work. They teach you what customers truly want, they earn you loyal supporters, and they propel your startup out of obscurity.
And remember, you don’t have to tackle this journey alone. While you’re out there doing the unscalable groundwork – talking to users, refining your idea – you might need a reliable partner to handle some of the heavy lifting in building your product. That’s where molfar.io comes in. We specialize in helping startups like yours turn ideas into reality with speed and agility. Whether it’s prototyping your MVP while you’re busy courting early customers, or iterating on your product so you can focus on growth, our team has your back. We’ve helped founders validate ideas, build robust products, and accelerate their go-to-market, all while maintaining the user-first philosophy.
Ready to turn your startup’s early hustle into long-term success? Contact molfar.io today, and let’s build something great together! We’ll help you lay the foundation while you focus on doing those crucial things that don’t scale. Hustle now, scale later – and with the right support, that later will come sooner than you think.