#20 - Why Do Things that Don't Scale?

This will be a short blog post, as I am writing a longer article (in Vietnamese) on how we applied doing things that don't scale to our own product - A Little Optimism. Sign up for my newsletter to have new practical articles on Product & Startups delivered to your inbox.

Do things that don't scale is a great essay by Paul Graham. Anyone who's remotely interested in entrepreneurship must have come across this advice at some point.

But why do founders need to do things that don't scale?

There's no need for scalable work because you can't start reality-warping on a large scale

When you're working on a startup, what you're really doing is warping reality.

What do I mean by warping reality? You've built a product, and now you're trying to find people who value your product. If you're successful, you're effectively changing that person's reality, such that now they're living in a world where they're using something (that they otherwise wouldn't) to improve their lives. Your decision to build and push the product out is a reality warper.

You can't do that on a large scale (unless you're Elon Musk or Bill Gates). The only way to warp reality is to start at the lowest level of abstraction - things & people around you.

There's no need for scalable work when you're trying to change your surroundings.

There's no room for scalable work unless you have at least one person who finds your product valuable

Only by influencing one person at a time can you hope to kickstart adoption. People are generally smart. You can't make them adopt something that they don't value.

If they don't stick around, it's best to learn why and move on. But as soon as you land on a person who finds your product valuable, and does actually use it frequently, you're onto something important.

Acquiring that person surprisingly takes a tremendous amount of efforts. You often don't know where they are, who they are, and how to best communicate value to them. You most probably will stumble on them by accident.

But once that happens, you need to intensely focus.

There is no room for scalable things, because you have no idea if there are enough people who'd find your product valuable. You just know that at least one person does.

You need to extract as much insights as possible from just a few data points, because that's all you can afford. You don't have the luxury of waiting for statistical significance, because startups are themselves statistical anomalies.

There's no room for scalable work for an early-stage startup, at least until you've found some people who really value your product.

Scalable work has an adverse effect for early-stage startups

People often refer to the zero to one concept as reaching your first million dollars, or achieving Product-Market Fit, but there's a much more practical way to think about this:

• (0) is when you don't have anyone who finds your product valuable.
• (1) is when you have at least one person who does.

Scalable work is like an exponentiation. If a number is larger than 1 (such as 1.2) then exponentiation will make it grow numerically. But if it's smaller than 1 (say 0.7) then exponentiation results in a decreased number.

Why is this metaphor relevant? Doing scalable work distracts you from focusing on acquiring the first person who finds your product valuable. It distracts you from going from (0) to (1).

If you're not at (1) yet, scalable work will only be subtractive. There's nothing of importance to scale, and scaling unimportant things just makes them more unimportant.

We intuitively get this idea

Imagine trying to move a glass of water using only your mind. I used to to this as a child, and I suspect you may have done it as well.

If such a feat is even possible, it'd only be possible through intense focus at a singular point. That's why people think focusing intensely on an object could make it move. We intuitively connect intense focus to miracles.

Even though it won't help you bend the laws of physics, intensity can transform your startup from nothing to something. That's a huge step forward. The potential big bang. The one event that can kickstart something.

There's no scalability in intense focus, because it's all about applying pressure to a singular point, in hopes that it may move the needle.

And that's why you should do things that don't scale.