Many in the startup world have probably heard the advice of early on in the business, do things that don’t scale. Why is that so important? One of the most common mistakes I see startups make is building too much too soon. By doing things that don’t scale, you force yourself to learn, iterate, and focus on what matters. Here are some examples.

Pivoting through an idea

As you move through customer discovery, there is a lot you don’t know. In the beginning I find it more valuable to have deeper 1-1 conversations with potential customers versus surveying hundreds of people. While the 1-1 approach doesn’t fully scale, it is an important strategy to really learn the nuances of your potential customer’s problems, workflow, solutions, etc. that can help you better shape your solution. As you refine that idea and have a better hypothesis, then you can start trying to do some customer discovery that scales across many potential customers.

Getting first customers

In our Atlanta Ventures Studio, we intentionally don’t build any product as we iterate through an idea. We don’t officially launch the company until we have found authentic demand. We simply define that as people are willing to pay for the product before it exists. A Powerpoint drawing or digital rendering should be good enough. This helps because you learn the importance of the problem, that anything you are doing is better than what they are currently doing, and they want to build it with you as a design partner (and as a bonus set expectations that the first version won’t be perfect).

Focusing time and money

As you get design partners, you now need to deliver some product. But even then, the first version we often deliver manually through behind the scenes efforts, reports, consulting services, etc. 80-90% of what you build in a first version of a product will be wasted, so why spend time and money building wasted features? Instead, iterate with your design partners on solutions that don’t scale. Then once you see consistency in the product need and gain more confidence in what to build, that is the best time to take the next step to building something that can scale.

If you focus your early efforts on learning and iterating with things that don’t scale, you gain more confidence in your approach to ultimately go build things that do scale.