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Comment by sflores4 | Hacker News Reader

Hi Ooshma! -- you mentioned in your talk that you + team did things that didn't scale to delight existing users and acquire new ones. Kevin Hale brought this up during his Startup School lecture, writing Christmas cards to all of their users, but referenced a user writing to him the following year asking when he would receive this year's xmas card.

When deciding what "non-scalable thing" you were going to do, did you ever wonder: will this come back and bite me in the butt when I can no longer do this with a large user-base because of either time or monetary restraints?

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This is an awesome question.

See my other answer about getting our first users and then here is Part II of that answer:

AirBNB scaled product appeal by later building out an entire internal marketplace and international network of freelance photographers to take great photos of all their hosts' properties.

I care deeply about the personal touch of our business and personalization in both our communications and the dinner kits given to each member every week. We have built software and systems that target my direct communications and our overall lifecycle emails in a very nuanced way across our community. We slice and dice our community in different ways constantly for all daily experiments, communications, and backend analyses. I hate sending someone an email that is not relevant to them.

When you do something that doesn't scale, you gain key insights into what is working for your company. You may not be able to replicate the exact same action from the early days, but you can certainly work to build a scalable solution that replicates those key insights and yields the same success.

PS: I know some excellent mechanical hand-writing services and I'll email Kevin a few options ;)

Haha! about to be so many Kevin Holiday cards this season.

Thanks for your answer, super helpful as my team and I create new ways of connecting with our users.

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