It’s day 7 of Blogvent, where I blog every day in December!

There was a point in the past few years where it was very trendy amongst founders to say, “do things that don’t scale.” That meant doing more manual work (like individually emailing cold calls for sales leads, or not optimizing certain technical things and just ship faster, or talking to human beings in person to try your product).

I do think there’s merit to the concept. Doing things that don’t scale/are not fully optimized or automated often can mean more human connections, and even human errors, but I think it works.

”The slow way” of my own newsletter responses

Something I tried earlier this year is asking some questions of my new newsletter subscribers:

• What do you do?
• What do you like to read?
• How did you find this?
• What is your favorite joke?
• What is your dream?

So, whenever someone subscribes, they have the option of responding to an email with these questions in them.

It has been delightful reading and responding to these questions!! I’ve built such nice connections with people, even if they’re small. I loved it so much I ended up sending out a survey to existing subscribers too! That was also awesome, but definitely turned into a, “oh no, this DOES NOT scale!!” situation and I am still slowly but surely responding to folks’ answers, several months later (I think I’m almost at 100 responses left? Ish? It is endless).

I did try to do some optimizations here (for example I answered these questions myself and have an AMA repo on GitHub), but have really tried to stick to just regular ol’ human emails.

Is there room for more? Maybe.

“Doing things that don’t scale” doesn’t always have to be just manual repetitive work. It could be taking courses or coaching, asking for help more often, iterating on a problem in smaller increments, or even just not optimizing something too early.

I will say, though I have loved this concept of doing things more for the human connection side of things, I am a software engineer at heart and genuinely enjoy optimizing things in a way that can automate away repetitive tasks.

But, thinking about optimization too early can stop you from shipping things. So many of my own projects (and projects that I see my friends take on) end up dying before they’re ever launched because they need to be perfect way too early.

Anyway. I think the lesson I’ve learned is to try to not pre-optimize, and do the slower thing, until there’s enough value to be gained from scaling up. Defining that value… is up to you.

See you tomorrow!