“Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off”.
Do things that don’t scale. Yes, scaling is important but sometime it is overlooked or just misunderstood. I saw starting business falling just because they focus on scaling and scaling strategies too early in their stage. Sure, for some businesses or aspects of the business, thinking about scaling from the beginning is essential, but for others, it is only necessary to a certain extent. For technological company it might be vital to scale fast but the grocery store where you go to buy your food going back home or the small bakery that started on the next corner it is not a must for survival. But I think both of them share some common trace in the their early stage when they are new and fragile. And they need to scale an recruit customers.
Paul Graham‘s points are all in the direction that even if you need to scale you have to do your daily unscalable staff wisely. Whether a business will scale or not depends on many factors and one of the most important is to know your customers and your process (for the tech company, for the grocery and for the bakery). As is said in the article “Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off“. Scaling is the result of understating your business and processes and improve them over time. And my experience proves this is so true “But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.“
The concept is very well laid out and is one of those that you might want to reread periodically.
I also beleive that doing things that don’t scale might be good for your health and well being too.
“You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans.”
1000 true fans – In the era of social media everybody wants to have fans. And not just few but as much as possible. But do you really need hundreds of thousands of fans? The correct answer should be “Depends” but if you are aiming a decent living 1000 fans might be sufficient. But they must be 1000 true fans! It is an interesting concept from Kevin Kelly. And there are business ko-fi.com and substack.com build to serve people exploring this concept like. I think that the concept has also build-in the fundamentals of every business – that it should satisfy its shareholders in order to continue doing it and has to pay its expenses and to its employees.
“The number 1,000 is not absolute. Its significance is in its rough order of magnitude — three orders less than a million. The actual number has to be adjusted for each person. If you are able to only earn $50 per year per true fan, then you need 2,000. (Likewise if you can sell $200 per year, you need only 500 true fans.) Or you may need only $75K per year to live on, so you adjust downward. Or if you are a duet, or have a partner, then you need to multiply by 2 to get 2,000 fans. For a team, you need to multiply further. But the good news is that the increase in the size of your true-fan base is geometric and linear in proportion to the size of the team; if you increase the team by 33% you only need to increase your fan base by 33%.“
I think another suitable headline for this article might be $100K per person in the business. Even though Kelly speaks about creators I think that this concept can scale and be applied in small business as well because he speaks about “$100 profit from each true fan” not just income. And it might be looked as doorway to flattering salaries among people in a company.