What things that don't scale did you do at the beginning?

Call your customers. Get on the phone with them. Figure out how you can solve their pains. Even if it involves you doing things manually.

• Curating science teaching materials manually. It doesn't scale, it's tedious. A script could do that job in hours, but quality would suffer, so automating for scale would be a waste.

• Set up a website dev and hosting service with no automation. Doesn't scale, each website need to be setup and customized manually, doesn't scale, each and every customer requires the same amount of time to serve. It never took off so no regret at all, automating for scaling would have been a waste.

• Autoring books. It doesn't scale. The sales do, in the sense that publishing on a market place means zero marketing effort absolutely needed to get an extra sale, but the process of writing, editing, publishing is manual for each book. It doesn't scale, automating part of the process would have been a waste as sales took off but not enough to justify automating anything.