Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
I used to think "do things that don't scale" meant sending personal emails to each customer or hand-delivering products. You know, the cute startup stories everyone loves to tell at conferences.
Then I worked with a B2B SaaS client who was drowning in signups but starving for revenue. They had beautiful product pages, slick onboarding, and were celebrating their "growth" - but their conversion rate was 0.8%. Meanwhile, their scrappy competitor was hitting 3.2% conversion with what looked like a basic website.
That's when I realized most founders completely misunderstand what "doing things that don't scale" actually means. It's not about being cute or nostalgic. It's about building your marketing and distribution machine before you optimize your product.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience helping startups break through the "beautiful product, no customers" trap:
Why "do things that don't scale" is actually about distribution strategy, not customer service
The real difference between scalable and unscalable growth tactics
How I helped clients choose the right unscalable tactics for their situation
A practical framework for deciding when to scale vs. when to stay manual
The growth strategies that actually move the needle in the first 90 days
Industry Reality
What every startup founder thinks this advice means
Walk into any startup accelerator or browse any entrepreneurship forum, and you'll hear the same interpretation of "do things that don't scale" over and over:
Send personal emails to every customer - because automation is evil
Hand-deliver your product - because logistics don't matter yet
Manually onboard every user - because personal touch equals growth
Build everything custom - because tools are for later
Talk to every customer personally - because surveys aren't intimate enough
This interpretation exists because it feels authentic and founder-y. There's something romantic about the idea of personally delivering your first orders or spending hours crafting individual welcome emails. It makes for great startup war stories.
The problem? Most founders focus on the wrong side of "unscalable." They optimize for customer delight tactics that feel meaningful but don't move business metrics. Meanwhile, they completely ignore the unscalable marketing and distribution work that actually drives growth.
Here's what I've observed after working with dozens of startups: the companies that succeed aren't the ones doing cute manual customer service - they're the ones doing unglamorous manual marketing.
They're spending hours researching individual prospects on LinkedIn. They're writing highly specific cold emails to 50 people instead of blast emails to 5,000. They're manually posting in 20 niche communities instead of paying for broad social media ads.
The conventional wisdom misses the point entirely. "Do things that don't scale" isn't about customer experience - it's about distribution strategy.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The realization hit me when I was working with a B2B SaaS client who was stuck in what I call the "beautiful product trap." Their product was genuinely good - great UX, solid features, happy existing customers. But they were burning through their runway because new customer acquisition had stalled.
The founders were following the traditional "do things that don't scale" playbook perfectly. They personally onboarded every trial user. They sent handwritten thank-you notes. They jumped on calls with anyone who asked. Their Net Promoter Score was through the roof.
But here's the thing - they were only getting 3-4 new trial signups per week. All that beautiful, unscalable customer experience was being wasted on a tiny trickle of users.
When I dug into their approach, I discovered something telling. While they were spending 20 hours a week on "unscalable" customer delight, they had completely automated their marketing. Generic LinkedIn ads, automated email sequences, SEO content written by contractors who didn't understand their industry.
It was backwards. They were doing scalable (but ineffective) marketing to feed an unscalable (but delightful) customer experience.
Meanwhile, I looked at their main competitor - a company with a clunkier product but 10x the growth rate. What were they doing differently? Their founder was spending 30 hours a week on manual marketing. Hand-researching prospects, writing personalized outreach, building relationships in industry forums, speaking at niche events.
Their customer onboarding was mostly automated, but their customer acquisition was completely manual. And it was working.
That's when I realized most founders have "do things that don't scale" completely backwards. The real insight isn't about scaling customer experience last - it's about scaling marketing and distribution last.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Based on this insight, I completely restructured how I approach early-stage growth strategy. Instead of asking "what customer experience should we make unscalable?" I started asking "what marketing channels should we keep manual?"
Here's the framework I developed and tested with multiple clients:
Step 1: Audit Your Current "Unscalable" Activities
I had clients list everything they were doing manually and categorize it into two buckets: customer experience and customer acquisition. The pattern was always the same - they were over-investing in unscalable customer experience and under-investing in unscalable customer acquisition.
Step 2: The Marketing Manual Override
For the SaaS client, we completely flipped their approach. Instead of automated LinkedIn ads, the founder started spending 2 hours every morning researching and personally messaging potential customers. Instead of generic content marketing, they wrote highly specific posts about problems only their industry would understand.
We killed their automated email marketing and replaced it with manual outreach to 10 highly qualified prospects per day. Each email was researched, personalized, and tied to specific business triggers we'd identified.
Step 3: The Bullseye Method for Unscalable Channels
I used a modified version of the Bullseye Framework to identify which marketing channels to keep manual. The key insight: early-stage companies should manual-test channels before automating them, not the other way around.
For this client, we tested:
Manual LinkedIn outreach - founder personally researching and messaging 50 prospects weekly
Industry community participation - actively answering questions in 5 specific Slack groups
Personalized cold email - 10 researched emails per day instead of 1,000 automated ones
Partnership outreach - manually building relationships with 3 potential integration partners
Step 4: Measuring What Actually Matters
We tracked metrics differently than most startups. Instead of focusing on volume metrics (total emails sent, total ad impressions), we measured quality metrics (response rates, meeting booking rates, trial-to-paid conversion by source).
The manual LinkedIn outreach had a 23% response rate compared to 2% for their previous automated campaigns. The industry community participation generated 40% of their qualified leads despite being "unscalable."
Step 5: The Scaling Decision Framework
Here's the critical part - knowing when to scale vs. when to stay manual. I developed simple rules:
If a manual channel is producing your highest-quality leads, keep it manual until you max out your capacity
If you're getting consistent results from 20+ hours/week of manual work, then consider automation
Never automate a channel until you've personally done it manually for at least 30 days
Key Insight
The goal isn't to stay unscalable forever - it's to find what works before you scale it. Most founders scale the wrong things because they never manually tested what actually converts.
Time Investment
Expect to spend 20-30 hours per week on manual marketing activities for the first 3 months. This isn't overhead - this IS your growth strategy until you find what works.
Channel Focus
Start with 1-2 manual channels maximum. Going wider before going deeper is the fastest way to dilute your efforts and get mediocre results across everything.
Scaling Trigger
Only automate channels that are already producing 50%+ of your qualified leads through manual effort. If it doesn't work manually, automation won't save it.
The results from this approach were dramatic and fast. Within 60 days of implementing manual marketing tactics:
Lead Quality Transformation: Manual LinkedIn outreach generated leads with 3x higher trial-to-paid conversion rates compared to their previous automated campaigns. The reason? Personal research meant they were targeting people with actual budget and authority.
Customer Acquisition Cost: Even though manual outreach took more time, the overall CAC decreased by 40% because the conversion rates were so much higher. Time spent on research upfront saved money on wasted leads.
Pipeline Velocity: Manual outreach leads moved through the sales process 50% faster because they were pre-qualified and already understood the value proposition from the personalized messaging.
Founder Insight Development: Perhaps most importantly, the founder developed deep insights about their ideal customer profile that no amount of automated testing could have provided. This insight informed everything from product development to pricing strategy.
The manual approach also revealed channel opportunities they never would have discovered through automation. Community participation led to speaking opportunities, which led to partnership discussions, which led to their biggest enterprise deal.
After 90 days, they had enough data and relationships to start selectively automating the highest-performing tactics while keeping the core research and relationship-building manual.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons I learned from implementing "do things that don't scale" correctly across multiple startups:
1. Distribution beats product optimization every time. A mediocre product with great distribution will outperform a great product with mediocre distribution. Focus your unscalable efforts on the distribution side first.
2. Manual doesn't mean inefficient. Writing 10 highly researched emails often produces better results than sending 1,000 automated ones. The goal is effectiveness, not efficiency.
3. Founder time is your most valuable unscalable resource. Early-stage founders should spend the majority of their time on activities only they can do - understanding customers, building relationships, and developing market insights.
4. The best insights come from manual work. You can't automate your way to product-market fit. The insights that drive breakthrough growth come from direct, personal interaction with your market.
5. Scale the right things at the right time. Customer experience can often be automated early, but customer acquisition should stay manual until you've found repeatable patterns.
6. Community beats content. Participating manually in existing communities where your customers gather is often more effective than creating automated content marketing campaigns.
7. Quality metrics matter more than volume metrics. Track response rates, conversion rates, and deal sizes rather than impressions, clicks, and email opens.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing this approach:
Spend 50% of founder time on manual user acquisition activities
Research and personally message 50 prospects weekly instead of automated campaigns
Join 3-5 industry communities and actively participate rather than posting generic content
Track trial-to-paid conversion by acquisition source to identify highest-quality channels
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores implementing this approach:
Personally reach out to micro-influencers in your niche instead of broad social media advertising
Hand-select and personally contact potential wholesale or partnership opportunities
Manually engage with customers on social platforms rather than automated posting
Research and personally pitch to bloggers and publications for featured coverage