Do Things That Don’t Ever Have to Scale

I have long been a fan of the Paul Graham essay “Do Things that Don’t Scale.” I think of the earliest days of Andrena where I was the sole customer success team member through our first 1,000 subscribers: every customer call, text, email, visit, and more. This experience gave me an intimate understanding of our product, subscribers, and the role of customer success in the organization. It also laid the foundation of hiring our first customer success team members and building out an actual department.

Recently, however, I have been thinking about the notion of work that doesn’t need to scale. Recent examples of this have included financial modeling exercises and problem solving after a bug in a product roll out. These were both necessary projects where a result was needed in a timely fashion, but the solutions themselves didn’t need to be built for some mythical scale.

In these circumstances I have frequently seen folks revert to default states: engineers wanting to build a solution (“we’ll need a new dashboard”), feature requests for point solutions, or, perhaps the worst case scenario, avoiding tackling the problem altogether (“I don’t even know where to start”). Sometimes, however, the quickest path to a solution involves getting your hands dirty.

While this type of work might not be glamorous, I do believe that it is the kind of work that gets noticed at a company and where doing the hard thing pays off.

First, at a startup – especially with small teams – team players reign supreme. Someone had to do the work and you raised your hand even if it’s not in your stated job description. This does not go unnoticed.

Second, it demonstrates that you understand the details. An employee who is able to problem solve based on their knowledge of the inner workings of a business combined with the tools available to them is an invaluable member of the team.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly,  it demonstrates an ability to work outside of your default state. No startup is a straight line – despite what they might want you to think! – and flexibility helps navigate through those local minimums and maximums.

The sausage factory isn’t glamorous, but someone has to know how it gets made.