Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
When I started working with early-stage SaaS startups, I kept hearing the same obsession everywhere: "How do we scale this?" Founders would come to me with these elaborate automation dreams before they even had 10 paying customers.
Then I watched a client spend three months building an automated onboarding system for a product that nobody was using. Meanwhile, their competitor was personally calling every trial user and converting 40% of them to paid plans.
That's when I realized most startup advice is backwards. Everyone talks about scaling, but nobody talks about the magic that happens when you deliberately don't scale.
Through working with dozens of startups, I've discovered that the "do things that don't scale" approach isn't just a cute Paul Graham quote—it's actually the fastest way to build a real business. But here's what most people miss: there's a method to this madness.
Here's what you'll learn from my real-world experiments:
Why my clients who ignored "best practices" grew faster than those who followed them
The specific non-scalable tactics that generated the highest ROI
How to know when to stop doing things manually and start automating
The framework I use to identify which tasks should stay manual forever
Real examples of "unscalable" strategies that built million-dollar businesses
If you're tired of building features nobody wants while your competitors win with simple, human approaches, this playbook is for you. Let's dive into why small startups should break every scalability rule in the book.
Industry Reality
What every startup founder has been told about scaling
Walk into any startup accelerator or read any growth hacking blog, and you'll hear the same gospel: "Think scale from day one." The conventional wisdom goes something like this:
Build for tomorrow's problems: Design your systems to handle 10,000 users even when you have 10. Create automated workflows. Build robust infrastructure. Think big.
Automate everything: Manual processes are inefficient. Time is money. Build once, benefit forever. Let technology do the heavy lifting.
Standardize your approach: Create repeatable processes. Document everything. Build systems that anyone can operate. Remove the human element.
Focus on metrics that scale: Track funnel conversion rates. Optimize for lifetime value. Build dashboards. Let data drive decisions.
Hire for scale: Bring in experts who've "been there before." Get people who know how to build big systems. Avoid the learning curve.
This advice isn't wrong—it's just perfectly timed for the wrong stage. It's advice for companies with product-market fit, paying customers, and clear growth trajectories. For early-stage startups, it's like buying a Ferrari when you need to learn how to drive.
The problem is that focusing on scale too early creates a dangerous illusion. You're building infrastructure for customers you don't have, solving problems you haven't validated, and optimizing processes that might be completely wrong.
Meanwhile, you're missing the most important phase of building a business: figuring out what people actually want and how to deliver it in a way that creates genuine value. That requires getting close to customers, understanding their real problems, and iterating fast—none of which can be automated.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
This hit me hard when I was working with a B2B SaaS startup that had built this beautiful, automated customer onboarding flow. Everything was streamlined, scalable, and efficient. The problem? Almost nobody was completing it.
The founder was frustrated. "We followed all the best practices," he told me. "Multi-step onboarding, progress bars, automated emails, the whole thing. But our activation rate is terrible."
Meanwhile, I was watching another client—a startup in a similar space—take a completely different approach. Instead of building elaborate onboarding automation, the founder was jumping on personal calls with every single trial user. No automation. No scale. Just him, a calendar link, and 30-minute conversations.
The difference in results was staggering. The "unscalable" approach was converting 40% of trial users to paid plans. The "scalable" approach was converting 4%.
But here's what really opened my eyes: during those personal calls, the second founder was learning things that no automated system could capture. He discovered that users were getting stuck on a specific feature that seemed obvious to him. He learned that people were using his product for a completely different use case than he'd intended. He found out that the real value wasn't what he thought it was.
Each conversation was like a mini user research session. He was building the product while talking to customers, not before. The "inefficient" approach was actually the most efficient way to build something people wanted.
That's when I realized the startup advice industry has it backwards. We're so obsessed with doing things "right" that we forget the whole point: figuring out what "right" actually means for your specific business and customers.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After working with dozens of startups and seeing this pattern repeat, I developed what I call the "Intentional Unscale" framework. It's about strategically choosing which things to keep manual, personal, and "inefficient" to maximize learning and build genuine relationships.
Step 1: The Customer Contact Rule
For every new customer in your first 100, have a real conversation. Not a survey, not an automated email sequence—an actual conversation. I recommend a simple process:
Send a personal email (not from no-reply@)
Ask for 15 minutes to understand their goals
Focus on their problems, not your features
Take notes on everything—especially the unexpected stuff
One client who followed this approach discovered that 60% of his users were trying to solve a problem he'd never considered. That insight led to a pivot that 10x'd his revenue.
Step 2: Manual Customer Success
Instead of building automated health scores and churn prediction, personally check in with every customer monthly. Yes, it's time-consuming. Yes, it doesn't scale. But it's the fastest way to understand what actually drives retention.
I watched a SaaS founder spend two hours every Friday manually reviewing every customer's usage and sending personal check-in emails. "Inefficient"? Maybe. Effective? His churn rate was 3% when the industry average was 15%.
Step 3: The Handcrafted Content Strategy
Instead of building content calendars and automation workflows, create content in direct response to customer questions. Every support ticket becomes a blog post. Every sales call objection becomes a case study. Every feature request becomes a product update video.
This approach feels chaotic compared to traditional content marketing, but it creates something magical: content that actually addresses real problems that real people have right now.
Step 4: Personal Outreach Over Marketing Funnels
For B2B startups especially, manual outreach often beats any automated marketing funnel. I've seen founders build complex lead scoring and nurture sequences when a simple LinkedIn message would have closed the deal.
One client replaced his entire marketing automation stack with a simple process: research 10 potential customers daily, send 10 personal messages, have 3 conversations, close 1 deal per week. "Unscalable"? Absolutely. Profitable? Definitely.
Step 5: The Learning Threshold Test
Here's how to know when to stop doing something manually: when you stop learning new things from the process. If every customer conversation sounds the same, automate onboarding. If every support ticket follows the same pattern, build self-service. If every sales call covers identical objections, create a demo video.
The key is waiting until you have enough data to automate intelligently, not prematurely.
Key Insights
Track what you learn, not just what you earn. The real ROI is in customer insights, not immediate revenue.
Time Investment
Spend 2-3 hours weekly on unscalable activities. It's an investment in understanding your market deeply.
Learning Signals
Stop manual processes when you can predict outcomes. Automation works best after pattern recognition.
Revenue Reality
Unscalable' tactics often generate higher revenue per customer than automated approaches in early stages.
The results from this approach consistently surprised both me and my clients. The B2B SaaS founder who implemented personal customer calls saw his conversion rate jump from 4% to 40% within two months. More importantly, his customer lifetime value increased because he was attracting and retaining the right customers.
Another client who replaced his marketing automation with manual outreach generated $50k in revenue in 90 days with just 3 hours of daily effort. His cost per acquisition dropped to virtually zero, and his close rate hit 25%—unheard of for automated campaigns.
But here's what surprised me most: the speed of iteration. When you're talking directly to customers instead of looking at dashboard metrics, you can identify and fix problems in days instead of months. One client pivoted his entire pricing model after just 10 customer conversations revealed a massive misunderstanding about his value proposition.
The timeline was consistent across clients: noticeable improvements in customer satisfaction within 2 weeks, measurable revenue impact within 30 days, and fundamental business insights within 60 days. Compare that to traditional "scalable" approaches that often take 6+ months to show meaningful results.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After watching dozens of startups implement these "unscalable" approaches, here are the most important lessons I've learned:
1. Personal beats perfect every time. A handwritten email from the founder converts better than the most polished automated sequence. Customers can sense when they're talking to a real person who cares about their success.
2. Learning has a half-life. The insights you gain from manual processes degrade over time. What you learn in month one is pure gold. What you learn in month six might be incremental. Know when to transition to automation.
3. Scale is a drug. Once you start automating, it's addictive. Resist the urge to automate everything just because you can. Some things should stay manual forever (like founder-customer relationships in B2B).
4. Efficiency isn't effectiveness. The most efficient process might be the least effective at building a real business. Sometimes "wasting" time on manual tasks is the highest ROI activity you can do.
5. Competitors can copy your features, not your relationships. Personal connections with customers create the strongest moat in the early stages. It's the one advantage that truly doesn't scale—and that's exactly why it works.
6. Documentation defeats the purpose. Don't try to systematize everything you learn from unscalable activities. Some knowledge only exists in relationships and conversations, and that's perfectly fine.
7. Know your transition triggers. Have clear criteria for when to move from manual to automated. It's usually when you can predict 80% of outcomes from any given interaction.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups specifically:
Personal onboarding calls for first 100 customers
Founder-led customer success until $100k ARR
Manual feature prioritization based on direct customer feedback
Personal LinkedIn outreach over paid acquisition
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores:
Personal follow-up emails for first 1000 customers
Handwritten thank you notes for high-value orders
Direct customer calls for product feedback and reviews
Manual curation of product recommendations