Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Here's something that'll make you uncomfortable: the side project I threw together in two days generated more qualified leads for my consulting business than my perfectly optimized main website did in six months.
We're constantly told to "think big," "build for scale," and "optimize everything." But here's the thing nobody talks about - while you're busy building your scalable empire, your competitors are doing things that absolutely DON'T scale and eating your lunch.
I learned this the hard way after spending months perfecting my website design process while watching freelancers with terrible websites land bigger clients through one weird trick: they built tiny, focused tools that solved one specific problem.
This playbook is about embracing the beautiful messiness of non-scalable side projects. You'll discover:
Why "do things that don't scale" applies to more than just early customer acquisition
The exact framework I use to validate business ideas in days, not months
How unscalable side projects become your best lead generation machines
Real examples from my own experiments (including the failures)
When to kill a project vs. when to double down
Stop building for imaginary scale. Start building for real traction.
Industry Reality
What Silicon Valley VCs Tell You to Build
If you've read any startup advice in the last decade, you've heard the same mantras repeated endlessly. "Build something that scales." "Think 10x bigger." "Automate everything from day one." The entire startup industrial complex is obsessed with scalability as the ultimate measure of success.
Here's what every accelerator program will tell you:
Build an MVP that can handle millions of users - Even though you have zero users today
Focus on product-market fit at scale - Before you understand your market at all
Optimize conversion funnels - When you don't have enough traffic to optimize
Build robust infrastructure - For problems you don't have yet
Hire for roles you'll need "eventually" - Burning cash on future problems
This advice exists because VCs need businesses that can generate massive returns. They're not investing in lifestyle businesses or modest successes - they need unicorns. So naturally, all startup advice gets filtered through this "scale or die" mentality.
But here's where this conventional wisdom falls apart: most successful businesses didn't start scalable. Airbnb founders manually photographed listings. Stripe's founders personally onboarded their first merchants. These companies succeeded BECAUSE they did things that didn't scale first.
The problem with scale-first thinking is that it prevents you from learning what actually matters to your customers. You're so busy building for imaginary future problems that you never solve the real problems happening right now.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
About two years ago, I was stuck in what I call "optimization paralysis." My web design consultancy was doing okay, but I kept hearing the same advice: scale your processes, build systems, optimize everything. So I spent months building the "perfect" client onboarding system, creating detailed SOPs, and designing scalable workflows.
The result? My business felt sterile and generic. Clients were happy but not excited. I was competing on process rather than unique value. Meanwhile, I watched other freelancers with messier operations land dream clients through what seemed like luck.
That's when I stumbled into my first truly unscalable side project by accident. A SaaS founder I knew was struggling with something specific - he needed a way to analyze competitor pricing but couldn't find a tool that worked for his niche market. Every solution was either too complex or too generic.
Instead of referring him to existing tools or trying to build a scalable SaaS solution, I did something ridiculous: I offered to manually research his top 20 competitors every month and deliver a custom report. No automation, no fancy dashboard, just me spending a few hours doing detective work.
He paid me $500 for something that took me 3 hours. But more importantly, word spread. Within two weeks, I had three similar requests from his network. This "unscalable" service was generating more revenue per hour than my main web design work.
The lightbulb moment came when I realized I'd accidentally validated a real need by doing something that absolutely couldn't scale. I was manually doing work that could theoretically be automated, but the manual approach was actually the feature - it was customized, nuanced, and delivered insights no automated tool could provide.
This experience made me question everything I'd been taught about building businesses. What if the goal wasn't to scale immediately? What if doing things manually first was actually the fastest path to understanding what people really wanted?
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After that first accidental success, I developed a systematic approach to creating deliberately unscalable side projects. This isn't about being lazy or avoiding automation - it's about using manual processes as a validation and learning tool.
Step 1: Find the "In-Between" Problems
The best unscalable projects solve problems that exist in the gap between existing solutions. I look for situations where people say "I wish there was a tool that..." but the solution would require too much customization for a scalable product.
For example, I noticed SaaS founders constantly asking for competitor analysis in very specific contexts. Generic tools like SEMrush were too broad, and custom research firms were too expensive. There was a sweet spot for manual-but-affordable competitive intelligence.
Step 2: The "What If I Just Did This For You?" Test
Instead of building tools or creating complex solutions, I test demand by offering to do the work manually. This sounds counterintuitive, but it's incredibly powerful for validation. When someone pays you to do something manually, you know the pain is real.
I've used this approach to validate ideas for content auditing, SEO research, pricing strategy consulting, and even AI implementation planning. Each time, the manual approach taught me things I never would have learned building a scalable solution first.
Step 3: Document Everything You Learn
Every manual project becomes a learning laboratory. I track not just what clients pay for, but what questions they ask, what outcomes they care about, and where my assumptions were wrong. This intelligence becomes the foundation for either scaling the service or pivoting to something better.
For instance, clients hiring me for competitor research actually cared more about identifying market positioning opportunities than tracking pricing changes. This insight led me to develop a different (still mostly manual) service around market positioning audits.
Step 4: Embrace Strategic Inefficiency
The magic happens when you resist the urge to optimize too quickly. I deliberately keep successful unscalable projects manual longer than necessary because the inefficiency is often the differentiator. Clients value the human insight and customization they can't get from automated tools.
Eventually, some projects naturally evolve toward scalability as I identify the 20% of manual work that delivers 80% of the value. But many stay beautifully unscalable and become premium consulting services rather than products.
This approach has helped me validate multiple SaaS ideas before writing a single line of code, build a network of ideal clients through solving their immediate problems, and create multiple revenue streams that complement rather than compete with my main business.
Validation Speed
Test real demand in days, not months, by offering manual solutions before building anything.
Human Intelligence
Manual processes often provide better insights than automated tools, especially for complex or nuanced problems.
Network Effects
Solving specific problems manually creates strong relationships and word-of-mouth referrals in your target market.
Strategic Learning
Use inefficiency as a feature to understand what clients really value before optimizing or scaling.
The results from this "deliberately unscalable" approach surprised me. Over 18 months, I launched seven different manual services, each testing a different business hypothesis:
Financial Impact: These unscalable projects generated 40% more revenue per hour than my main consulting work. The competitor research service alone brought in $15K in its first six months with minimal time investment.
Client Quality: Manual services attracted higher-quality clients who valued custom solutions over generic tools. These became some of my best long-term consulting relationships.
Learning Velocity: I validated or invalidated new business ideas 10x faster than traditional MVP approaches. Instead of spending months building, I could test demand in a single conversation.
Unexpected Pivots: Three of the seven manual services revealed completely different opportunities than I initially thought. For example, what started as pricing research evolved into market positioning consulting - a much more valuable service.
Most importantly, these projects taught me that scalability isn't always the goal. Some of my most profitable work remains deliberately manual because the customization and human insight are the actual product, not inefficiencies to be eliminated.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Resist the Scale-First Mentality: Your first version should solve one person's problem perfectly, not a million people's problems adequately.
Manual is a Feature, Not a Bug: Don't be embarrassed about doing things manually. Clients often pay premium for human insight and customization.
Time-Box Your Experiments: Set clear limits on time and money invested in each unscalable project to avoid analysis paralysis.
Documentation is Everything: The real value comes from learning what clients actually need vs. what you think they need.
Network Effects Are Real: Solving specific problems manually creates stronger relationships than generic solutions.
Not Everything Should Scale: Some of your most profitable work might stay beautifully unscalable, and that's perfectly fine.
Speed Beats Perfection: Testing demand with manual solutions is always faster than building "the right way" from the start.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, use unscalable side projects to:
Validate feature ideas before development
Build relationships with ideal customers
Generate revenue while building your main product
Test market positioning and messaging
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores, create manual services that:
Solve customer problems your products can't address
Provide premium consulting alongside product sales
Validate new product categories before inventory investment
Build deeper customer relationships and lifetime value