Why Doing Things That Don’t Scale Is the Ultimate Startup Superpower

How Handcrafted Experiences Turn Early Users into Lifelong Fans

Every founder dreams of their product going viral, but the secret weapon of the hottest startups isn’t a growth hack or ad campaign. It’s the willingness to do things that don’t scale. Airbnb’s founders didn’t just list homes—they visited hosts, took professional photos, and listened to feedback over kitchen tables. DonorsChoose wrote thousands of handwritten thank-you notes, forging bonds that no automated email could match. These stories, celebrated in the best books on entrepreneurship, prove a timeless truth: the path to scale is paved with personal, unscalable acts of care.

Why does this matter? Because the first 100 users are your product’s most honest critics and its first evangelists. When you onboard every user personally, answer every support ticket yourself, and treat every piece of feedback like gold, you don’t just build a better product—you build a movement. These early users become superfans, spreading the word far more effectively than any marketing campaign ever could.

Handcrafting the user experience reveals insights that can’t be found in spreadsheets or dashboards. You learn what delights, what frustrates, and what truly matters. The best founders treat every interaction as a learning opportunity, iterating relentlessly based on real conversations, not just data points. This is how you build a product people love, one relationship at a time.

As your company grows, the challenge is to preserve this spirit. The rituals and stories from your early days become the cultural DNA of your company. The handwritten notes may give way to personalized emails, but the principle remains: treat every customer like your first. The companies that scale with soul are those that never lose sight of the human at the other end of the transaction.

If you’re building something new, don’t rush to automate or outsource. Instead, embrace the magic of doing things that don’t scale. Your future self—and your future superfans—will thank you.