Snailscaling 🐌

Hello makers,

When bootstrapping your new venture, scaling slow can often be the ideal way to grow your product. Snailscaling is the art of scaling mindfully — when you absolutely need to.

Blitzscaling

Reid Hoffman, of Greylock Partners and the co-founder of LinkedIn, is an avid component of rapidly scaling companies, prioritizing speed over efficiency in order to massively grow in value as quickly as possible. Typically, this comes with an infusion of cash in the form of venture capital, with the idea of leaping way ahead of any competition, even before it exists.

He wrote a book about it.

This is great when you're backed with enough VC money to burn through your runway at will.

But what if you're a bootstrapper? How can you scale without that level of support?
 

Preemptive Scaleability

Too often I see technical solopreneurs belaboring over scalability. Let's make sure we build this using micro-services, in the cloud, and we need to be prepared for a huge surge when we launch!

Scaling for zero customers is still zero. Scaleability should not be your primary concern when building a product. Focus on the product itself. And the customer.
 

Snailscaling

Scaling slowly is more manageable for the bootstrapper. Instead of focusing on infrastructure, you can pay attention to customer feedback. Here are some things I've learned to snailcscale:
 

Customer Communication

In your early stages, you don't need the latest Customer Relationship Management software to manage your customers. Talk to them directly. Compose one-off emails. Be available. When it gets to the point that this is unmanageable, that's the time to invest in some CRM.
 

Automation

Along the same lines, doing things manually at first is a great way to get a direct handle on your scaling needs. If you find that you're constantly repeating some task, to the point where it's taking up too much of your time, it's time to automate it. I like to apply this to customer requests. Listen to customers, and handle requests on a needs basis at first. But when 10 customers ask for that same thing, maybe it's time to build that into the product.
 

Overhead Costs

Don't jump the gun and prep for an enormous server. Just get it up there, and make sure your costs are covered. When I launched Link My Photos, I had one customer paying $10/month, and my server costs were $7/month. The infrastructure has never exceeded the revenue.
 

Refactor

Refactoring is a part of product development. You don't need to prepare for every possible scenario before it happens. That's impossible! Accept the fact that at some point, if you're lucky, you'll need to optimize. But don't waste time optimizing what may never be used. Do it when it's absolutely necessary.
 

A Parting Link My Photos Anecdote

After 2 years or so, Link My Photos was extremely profitable for the amount of effort involved. Then one day, during Comic-Con, a ridiculously popular customer signed up and basically brought the app to a screeching halt. When they would post a new photo, tens of thousands of their followers would instantly visit Link My Photos to check the link, overloading our server infrastructure. I had not prepared for this.

After seeking some advice from some tech-savvy friends, I managed to re-architect the cloud server to take make these huge surges manageable. But with that new architecture came more cost. In one swift moment, Link My Photos profits were cut by over half. That hurt.

But it could have been worse. If I had constructed this infrastructure earlier in preparation for that type of usage, the app would not have been profitable for all those years leading up to this. When you're bootstrapping, you look forward to these moments of panic. You can move quickly and decisively when the time calls for it.

Don't overstretch yourself by rushing ahead to get there. Grow sustainably. That's how you snailscale.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Check out the past editions if you missed them, and don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord! 
 

Until next week,
Craig 👋