This Week I Learned: Don’t scale up when you’re starting up [2021–10–29]
This whole podcast episode seems packed with really succinct advice for early stage products and the people who care about them. One bite-sized piece of advice that stood out for me: don’t try to build your start-up product in a scalable way.
Wait, aren’t we all about scaling everything more than everything else these days??? Not before you’ve proved that a smaller number of people are “shut up and take my money”, and that means building out a scrappier, shortcuttier, hopelessly labour-intensive, perhaps even sacrificial early version of your technology & processes.
It reminds me of something I heard Mike Cannon-Brookes & Scott Farquar say: you’ve got to look for asymmetrical advantages. When you’re small, do things that a large company can’t. When you’re local, do things that strangers can’t. When you get larger, that’s the time to do large things that small companies can’t.
