An inside look at “doing things that don’t scale” 🤔
I’ve read Paul Graham’s article, "Do things that don’t scale" at least 10 times now. I actually just read it again this morning before getting started on the day.
Why? Because of this quote:
"A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off."
My goal in sharing this post is to give you an unfiltered / behind-the-scenes view at what my day-to-day looks like with Tribe Of Five (www.tribefive.me) so you can mentally get ready to also “do things that don’t scale” for your own launch and beyond.
And for reference, I launched on July 10 here to a waitlist of ~300 people. As of today, there are 45 users participating in a 30 day accountability challenge, a handful who have joined and are waiting for their tribes to fill up, and ~1-3 new new sign ups each day.
The big sections from the article are to:
1.RECRUIT USERS MANUALLY
“The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.”
Here is how I’m doing it (~4 hours per day):
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reply to any cold email responses in the inbox
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send out 10 personalized cold emails
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engage in 10 different discussions on Indie Hackers
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track details in a spreadsheet (who, when, what we talked about, how I can help them out)
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2.DELIGHT YOUR FIRST USERS
“Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them.”
Here is how I’m doing it (~5 hours per day):
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send a personalized welcome email for each person who downloads the app to let them know I would love to get their feedback along the way
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respond to emails from users about any feedback they’ve shared
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email anyone who signs up for the Android waitlist and try to get to know (a) who they are, (b) why they signed up, (c) what project they are working on
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iterate on the design and experience of the app for v1.1
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(just started today) show “sneak peek” wireframes / designs to users if they shared feedback and use it as an opportunity to ask for MORE feedback!
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3.USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT
“Another…technique for recruiting initially lukewarm users is to use your software yourselves on their behalf…it was exactly the right thing to do, because it taught us how it would feel to merchants to use our software. Sometimes the feedback loop was near instantaneous: in the middle of building some merchant's site I'd find I needed a feature we didn't have, so I'd spend a couple hours implementing it and then resume building the site.”
Here is how I’m doing it (0.5 - 1 hour per day):
- I’m on day 8 of the 30 day writing challenge. Each time I check in, or someone else from my tribe checks in, I get new ideas about how to improve the experience.
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4.MANUALLY DO THINGS YOUR PRODUCT CAN'T
“There's a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software, but are your software. When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later. This lets you launch faster, and when you do finally automate yourself out of the loop, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.”
Here is how I’m doing it (0.5 hours per day):
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Profile photo sizes don’t get reduced at the moment, so I manually go through and reduce the photo size for each user so that the experience is smoother
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We don’t great error handling, so sometimes a user can join a 30 day challenge multiple times or join different 30 day challenges. I go through the DB and clean these up.
Going forward, and for the foreseeable future, I think this is how my “average” day is going to be. I will admit that my ego gets in the way at least once a day, screaming, “this can't be how the big, famous startups got started”. But each time I read PG’s article, I remind myself, this IS the way.
With that said, it’s time to get back to doing more things that don’t scale!
Tip: Your working hours seem off (4h on 10 to 15 emails and 10 posts on IH? 5h on those same emails, feedback, and development when you only have 45 users?). Reconsider your priorities. Consistency is good, now improve your return by shifting focus 80/20.
Yes, do things that don't scale... but work smarter, not harder.
e.g.
Automate:
Send a personalized welcome email for each person who downloads the app to let them know I would love to get their feedback along the way. - Can be 100% automated and still be relatively natural. If you have onboarding questions, you can even automate personalizing the email. Some will notice, but this is a perfectly acceptable practice.
Email anyone who signs up for the Android waitlist and try to get to know (a) who they are, (b) why they signed up, (c) what project they are working on. - 100% to be automated.
Profile photo sizes don’t get reduced at the moment, so I manually go through and reduce the photo size for each user so that the experience is smoother. - Jesus... Automate right now. There are even SaaS that do this for you if you don't know how to do it yourself. Or even CDN that auto-compress.
Outsource:
Reply to any cold email responses in the inbox. - If this really contributes to those 4 hours per day, outsource it asap, unless you feel your time is worth only as much as you'd pay someone to reply to cold emails ($5 - $15/hr?).
Respond to emails from users about any feedback they’ve shared. - This is the same as above.
Don't do:
Engage in 10 different discussions on Indie Hackers. - Hop on IH once or maybe twice per day and ONLY reply to the 20% most relevant ones where your product/service is 100% providing value to the recipient (again Pareto principle).
Track details in a spreadsheet (who, when, what we talked about, how I can help them out) - If this is RE: engage IndieHackers: WAY overkill. Just have natural conversations. At only 45 users and 1 to 3 signups per day, you should be doing more important things.
Iterate on the design and experience of the app for v1.1. - You already have adopting users. Unless this is friction #1 that stops people from using your platform, stop iterating right now and start doing stuff that actually matters.
Fix:
Thanks for all the awesome suggestions, Sébastien. I certainly have a long ways to go to be more efficient! 80/20 is a great reminder to think ahead.
Re: email automation
Out of curiosity, how often do you respond to automated emails? I personally rarely do. My hypothesis was that I could get more % of replies back by personalizing and that would help me learn faster. So far, have gained so many new insights from early adopters and also from people who feel very comfortable to tell me where and why the app falls short of their expectations. Even got a shout out on a cold email! (reference)
My goal is to keep doing this to continue learning even though it takes me 10-30 minutes to write an email. Once v1.1 comes out, the plan is to definitely automate more of these on boarding / feedback request / cold emails.
Re: fix things
As a non-technical founder, I kick myself because of my inability to contribute code.
One of my co-founders is figuring out if he wants to continue working on the project. That story is for another day though!
The other is out on vacation / wedding at the moment. As soon as he gets back, we'll start development on v1.1.
Thanks again for reading and sharing some really good suggestions to be more effective AND efficient. Really appreciate you taking time to share.
Cheers!
Jonathan
I agree that automated cold emails that use a stock template and have 0 personalization are not going to be very successful. However that doesn't mean you can't automate the process of personalizing cold emails. By automating this process you'll be able to reduce the amount of time it takes to write & send each personalized email, meaning that you will be able to recruit more users each day.
To automate this process I'd suggest looking at the cold emails you write and identifying which paragraphs/sentences are personalized, and which parts are common across all emails you send. You can then create a template that uses a "formula" in terms of personalized vs unpersonalized parts, e.g.
Hi {first_name},
{personalized_intro_explaining_how_i_found_them}
Just wondering if you send cold emails to find new users for your startup? Does it take you longer than 15 minutes to write & send each email?
I've been working on a tool that will help you write & send personalized emails in less than 5 minutes, helping you find more users for your startup every day.
If you have a spare minute today, give it a try at www.actionable.me. It only takes a few minutes to send out your first email campaign.
Regards,
Jackson
I would then use this "formula" on prospects who have mentioned that it takes them a long time to write personalized cold emails.
For prospects who I know use cold email, but am not too sure of their time effort, I would use a template like this:
Subject: Quick question
Hi {first_name},
When finding new customers via cold email, do you personalize each email?
If so, from 1 to 10 (1 being very slow) how would you rate the speed of the personalization process?
Regards,
Jackson
P.S. {additional_personalized_comment}
You'll start to build a library of cold email templates which are all personalizable, and save you a tonne of time. This will also help you to split up users by the kinds of problems they have, helping you focus your cold email strategy on each individual's problem.
With this process in place, you can then use an Excel spreadsheet to collect names, email addresses, and write personalized fields for each person. You can then feed that spreadsheet into a cold email tool that will send those emails out in scale, at scheduled times, and will give you analytics on opens/replies/bounces.
Hope this helps!
Great suggestions, Sebastien. Not OP but will use for current project.
Have you thought about focusing a lot of your manual time on acquiring users rather than utilizing acquisition resources that currently exist (e.g. cold emails already in your inbox that probably aren't very relevant to your product)?
From a marketing lens at least, I think it makes sense to spend more time reaching out to relevant potential users via Twitter hashtags (#accountability, #30daychallenge) rather than cold emails. Similar to @Skullclown, I think that you could use that 4 hours of time allotted to new user outreach much more efficiently.
Best of luck, though! Sounds like a great initiative and I'd love to hear how it goes.
Thanks Chase! These are great suggestions.
I'm also a Twitter noob so trying to figure that channel out. So far, I'm barely getting any referral traffic from Twitter to my landing page so need to figure that out.
When you say "reach out to relevant potential users via Twitter hashtags"...do you mean to DM them / comment on posts or just straight up ask, "will you try out my app"? Thanks for any insights you can share!
It's fairly easy to search on Twitter and Instagram for specific hashtags and yes, I'd recommend linking to your site for users who are actively working on their own 30 day challenges! Giving someone who's independently working on a challenge some accountability mechanisms could be helpful for them and it's an easy transition to your platform.
I would also recommend testing a bit.ly link that allows you to use a UTM for tracking purposes. You lose a bit of link credibility and trust with a shortened URL, but you gain a lot of helpful marketing data.
Quick thing about twitter: it seems to be an AMAZING tool to market stuff and test taglines for "catchiness". What I'm doing right now, each day - test about 6-12 tagline/image scenarios, and see which works best. My advice is to do this each day, with a 20-40eur/day budget. The way I do it, I write the tweets, and then I promote them. Then, people will let me know which are the catchiest by simply liking the tweets and/or retweeting them.
A word of caution - I'm in the middle of this right now, but results to me look very very promising.
That sounds like a great way to test out catchiness. Can you share one of these that you've tried / are trying? Would love to see an example so I can wrap my head around this strategy!
I will know more about it since I'm in the middle of trying it. But you can look my twitter id (photawe) and take a look at my latest tweets. Should be rather self explaining.
If you reached out to me, a fellow IH person, with a request to try your app, I'd want to see a single-page explanation -- with two buttons: Yes / No -- No, means all the reasons why: Not now, not interested, not relevant etc. Yes, means I'll download it right now and try it -- since you already interrupted me.
I'd say, your goal is to just find YES people and don't spend any more time with No people.
This is what love about indie hackers, you will always find something to make you keep going. Thanks, @jianinglai, am doing the same thing especially recruiting users manually to my local classifieds app www.zimexapp.co.zw . Getting first users is hard but knowing others go thru the same thing is encouraging.
Good luck in your journey to get your project off the ground! Read (and re-read) Paul Graham's article once in a while to remind yourself that this is normal.
But also take advice from other Indie Hackers who've replied here...it's helped me realize there are MANY ways to optimize what I'm doing to get more leverage!
Glad to see you flesh this out, Jonathan.
I agree with Sébastien that much of your emailing could be automated. For example, I send a welcome email and explicitly ask for feedback for every new user as well. However, I have this automated. I do this by including the message right in the initial email confirmation email. Rather than using something like no-reply@, I send out the confirmation email directly from matthew@striptogether.co and let every new user know that they can simply hit reply to reach out with feedback, questions, or to let me know why they join StripTogether.
I like the way you're opening up the design/dev process with the showing of wireframes. I haven't gone that far, but I often use my Instagram Story to discuss ideas for upcoming features, or take polls of how my users make use of the site.
Would you be willing to share any stats on how often your users reply back either with feedback or questions, etc? If not publicly, I'd love to know over email (jonathan@tribefive.me).
My fear (99% unfounded) is that people don't reply back and churn from the product without telling me why. Even if they think the app is the most stupid thing they've ever tried out...I want to know!
That's a great point, and I have no doubt that you get a better response rate with a bit of personalization. Since you do have other founders who can take on the more technical side of things, this might not be the biggest waste of your time. For myself? Nine times out of ten, there's no response.
As far as communication with users goes, www.StripTogether.co is in a unique position in that I have tied things so closely to Instagram. I make up for a lack of emailing through a large number of polls, sliders, and questions in my IG stories. The new Questions feature is a godsend, since I'm no longer limited to 1:1 conversations through DMs. One user can ask a question, and I can answer back to my entire audience.
That is GENIUS to use the new questions feature on Instagram to get 1:n distribution. Talk about leverage.
I am actively on the hunt to find an equivalent and always gain new insights following along in your journey!
Haha, thanks. And right back atcha!
IMO the idea behind "do things that don't scale" is to do things manually (today) that have a high value to the growth of your product (tomorrow) and aren't easily scaleable and/or require significant engineering to make scaleable. Other things that don't correlate directly to the growth of your product and are time sinks each day need to be moved out of the way.
For example, you said:
BOTH of these things are time sinks for you each day and waste your time on something that doesn't contribute directly to your growth metrics. In fact, I encountered both issues you described while on-boarding with your app, BUT you had already acquired me at that point. I was willing to work through them.
These two issues can be resolved relatively easily by just sitting down and committing to take the little bit of time to research and solve them once and for all. Once they are fixed you will have that 30 minutes each day to focus on marketing, sales, or customer retention.
P.s. If you need help with either of those issues you can PM me and I will help you get solutions implemented.
Hey Ryan - you are 100% right that the focus needs to be on things that are high value for growth. The two bugs you faced are on the top of the backlog to fix (as soon as my technical co-founder is back from vacation)! Can't wait to get back that time each day =)
Thanks for the offer to help. Can tell you live your life based on the principles of The Go-Giver. Really appreciate it.
Look forward to get feedback from your experience on Tribe of Five.
The Go-Giver is one of my top 5 favorites 😁.
I will send some feedback over via email.
Wow, thanks Jonathan for such a great post.
For other who are looking for the article mentioned: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Glad you got value out of it. Thanks for the call out - I'll link the article in the post so it's easier for people to find.
I don't know what your backend system actually looks like, but it sounds like it has an authentication flaw (or a security issue if you want to classify it as such). Your team should find a way to prevent users from accessing unauthorized server resources so you won't have to manually edit your database.
I say this because I recently learned how to authenticate users with Node.js/Express.js 😃
Won't be able to comment on the specifics since I'm not technically competent =(
The bug is that someone joins a 30 day challenge but the backend doesn't respond in time (even though it adds the user). Since we don't do a good loading state, it means they can click the "join" button again. That adds another row in our DB that I just go in and delete for now...
Not elegant at all...but it works for now until my co-founder is back and we build in better loading / error handling states.