Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Last year I turned down a substantial platform project. The client had a big budget and an exciting technical challenge. But they made one statement that killed the deal for me: "We want to see if our idea works."
Here's the uncomfortable truth most entrepreneurs refuse to hear: if you're trying to validate demand, your MVP shouldn't take three months to build. It should take one day.
Most founders are building when they should be doing. They're optimizing for scale before they have anything worth scaling. This obsession with "growth hacks" and "scalable systems" is keeping startups trapped in endless development cycles while their competitors are out there getting real customers.
After working with dozens of SaaS startups and e-commerce businesses, I've seen this pattern destroy more promising ventures than bad product-market fit. The winners aren't the ones with the most elegant systems—they're the ones willing to do things manually until they prove something's worth automating.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience choosing manual over scalable:
Why the best growth strategies look terrible on spreadsheets
Real examples of non-scaleable tactics that built million-dollar businesses
The exact framework I use to decide when manual beats automated
How to implement "do things that don't scale" without burning out your team
When to transition from manual to scalable (and how to know you're ready)
Industry Reality
What the startup ecosystem preaches
Walk into any accelerator or read any growth blog, and you'll hear the same advice: "Build systems that scale." "Automate everything." "Think like you're already serving millions of users."
The typical startup playbook looks like this:
Build an MVP with automated onboarding - because manual onboarding "doesn't scale"
Set up marketing automation - because personally reaching out to prospects is "inefficient"
Focus on viral mechanics - because paid acquisition "isn't sustainable"
Optimize for metrics that scale - like CAC, LTV, and viral coefficients
Build features that reduce support needs - because customer success "costs too much"
This wisdom exists because VCs and advisors think in terms of eventual scale. They're not wrong about the end game—successful companies do need scalable systems. But they're catastrophically wrong about timing.
The problem with this approach? It optimizes for a future state that may never exist. You're building infrastructure for traffic you don't have, automating processes that haven't been proven, and scaling systems that might be fundamentally flawed.
Meanwhile, your competitors who are willing to do things manually are learning faster, adapting quicker, and building real relationships with actual customers. They're proving what works before they automate it.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When that client approached me about building their two-sided marketplace platform, everything looked perfect on paper. Big budget, interesting technical challenge, potential for significant equity upside. But their core statement revealed the fundamental problem.
They had no existing audience, no validated customer base, no proof of demand. Just enthusiasm and a belief that the right technology would solve their go-to-market challenge. They wanted to build first, then find customers.
I've seen this movie before. Three months and significant budget later, they'd have a beautiful platform that nobody wanted. The issue wasn't their idea—it was their approach.
Instead of taking their money, I told them something that initially shocked them: "If you're truly testing market demand, your MVP should take one day to build—not three months."
This philosophy comes from years of watching the same pattern play out across different client projects. The B2B SaaS client who spent months building automated email sequences before they knew what messages converted. The e-commerce store that invested in sophisticated inventory management before they knew which products people wanted. The agency that built complex project management workflows before they understood their actual service delivery process.
Every time, the manual approach revealed insights that would have been impossible to discover through automated systems. The SaaS client learned that their best customers preferred phone calls over email. The e-commerce store discovered that their highest-value customers wanted customization options that couldn't be automated. The agency found that their most profitable projects required a completely different workflow than they'd originally designed.
These discoveries only happened because they were willing to do things that didn't scale first.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's the exact framework I now use with every client, and what I recommended to that marketplace client instead of building their platform:
Day 1: Create Your Non-Scaleable MVP
Instead of building a platform, I suggested they create a simple landing page explaining their value proposition. No complex matching algorithms, no payment processing, no user profiles. Just a clear description of what they'd offer and a way for people to express interest.
For most businesses, this means:
A landing page or Notion doc explaining your solution
A simple contact form or email address
A way to capture demand without fulfilling it automatically
Week 1: Manual Outreach and Validation
This is where most founders' stomachs turn. Manual outreach sounds "unsexy" and "unscalable." But it's the fastest way to validate demand and learn about your market.
The specific tactics I recommend:
Personal LinkedIn outreach - not automated sequences, actual conversations
Direct emails to target customers - written by founders, not templates
Phone calls to potential users - yes, actual phone calls in 2025
In-person meetings at industry events - irreplaceable for B2B validation
Week 2-4: Manual Service Delivery
This is the part that separates successful founders from those who fail. Instead of building automation, manually deliver the service. For the marketplace client, this meant:
Manually matching supply and demand via email
Personally facilitating transactions through existing payment tools
Handling customer service through direct communication
Documenting every pain point and inefficiency
The Non-Scaleable Tactics That Actually Work
Based on my experience across different industries, here are the specific non-scaleable tactics that consistently outperform "growth hacks":
1. Founder-Led Customer Development
Every successful client has started with the founder personally talking to customers. Not surveys, not analytics—actual conversations. This revealed insights that no amount of data analysis could provide.
2. Manual Content Creation and Distribution
One B2B SaaS client grew from zero to 50,000 monthly visitors by having their founder write and personally share content on LinkedIn. No automation, no content calendar—just authentic expertise sharing.
3. Personal Customer Onboarding
Another client improved their trial-to-paid conversion by 300% by having the founder personally onboard every new user via Zoom. Completely unscalable? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
4. Direct Outreach to Industry Influencers
Instead of influencer marketing platforms, successful clients build relationships through direct, personal outreach. One email can be worth more than a thousand automated sequences.
5. Manual Customer Success
Rather than building elaborate customer success platforms, the most successful approaches involve founders personally ensuring customer success, learning exactly what creates value.
Manual First
Do manual validation before building anything. Your first 100 customers should feel like they're getting white-glove service.
Direct Outreach
Personal, founder-led outreach consistently outperforms automated sequences in early-stage validation and relationship building.
Pain Documentation
Manually deliver your service while documenting every pain point. These insights become your automation roadmap.
Transition Timing
Only automate processes after you've manually delivered them 50+ times and identified the exact value creation moments.
The results speak for themselves. Clients who embrace non-scaleable tactics first consistently outperform those who build automation early:
Faster Validation
Manual approaches reveal market fit or lack thereof within weeks, not months. One SaaS client discovered their target market was wrong after just 20 manual sales calls, saving them from building the wrong product.
Higher Quality Feedback
Personal interactions generate insights that automated systems miss. The marketplace client I advised later told me that manual matching revealed user preferences they never would have discovered through algorithmic approaches.
Stronger Early Relationships
Customers acquired through personal outreach become advocates and sources of referrals. Automation might scale acquisition, but manual efforts scale advocacy.
Better Unit Economics
Manual tactics often have better ROI in early stages because they require time instead of money, and time can be more precisely targeted to high-value activities.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here's what I learned from watching dozens of startups choose between scalable and manual approaches:
1. Distribution beats product quality - Always. A manual distribution channel that works is worth more than an automated system that doesn't.
2. Your automation assumptions are probably wrong - Every automated system I've seen work was built after extensive manual testing revealed what actually mattered.
3. Manual doesn't mean unsystematic - You can have processes and frameworks for manual work. The key is human judgment at critical decision points.
4. Scale is not the goal, validated scale is - Building something that scales the wrong thing is worse than doing the right thing manually.
5. Time constraints force prioritization - Manual approaches force you to focus on the highest-impact activities because you can't automate everything.
6. Customer insights compound - Each manual interaction teaches you something that improves the next interaction. Automated systems don't learn and adapt the same way.
7. The transition moment is obvious - When manual processes become painfully repetitive and you understand exactly what creates value, that's when you automate.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing non-scaleable tactics:
Founder-led customer development calls for first 100 users
Personal onboarding via Zoom for trial users
Direct LinkedIn outreach to target customers
Manual feature prioritization based on direct user feedback
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores using manual approaches:
Personal customer service for first 500 orders
Manual product curation based on customer requests
Direct outreach to potential wholesale customers
Hand-written thank you notes for early customers