Scaling is Overrated
Door Dash is one of my favorite apps to use. During the pandemic, it made it easy to bring prepared foods home or pick up random things needed locally from drug store chains.
I stumbled upon an interview on YouTube at Y Combinator at Stamford with one of the founders – Stanley Tang. He studied computer science at Stamford, and during his time in school, he and several friends created a beta approach to see if they had a viable idea. The video is from about 2014.
To test their hypothesis about how much pain there is around food delivery, they built a simple landing page for local restaurants in the Palo Alto area in one hour. They didn’t waste time building a complicated website or the technology to support a scalable model.
The phone number they used was a cell phone for one of the founders. They used Square to get paid.
And, most importantly, they were hyper-focused on gauging interest and seeing how much pain the problem caused hungry consumers.
They wanted to do three things:
- Test Their Hypothesis – is there strong demand and need for this service
- Launch Fast without Overthinking It – be quick to the market
- Do Things that Don’t Scale – don’t worry about perfect or how to go from 10 orders to a million. Scaling is overrated.
The last point was vital.
They didn’t build a backend system. Instead, they took orders over the phone, called the restaurant, and personally delivered it to customers. Scalability didn’t matter. They only cared if people needed the service and how they could gauge it quickly.
On day one, they had an order. They have no idea how they got found, but the landing page was called Palo Alto Food Delivery, so it probably came from a search.
On day two, they had two orders.
On day 3, multiple orders came in.
Something was happening. They knew they were onto something, but they let this manual system play out for a while to give them both first-hand learning and the confidence to build an app.
Eventually, they raised $15 million as the idea of delivering as a service took off.
Stanley’s short talk in this class was enlightening. Maybe it will spark some thoughts on how you could take an idea and rapidly try it out in the real world.
The idea of doing things that aren’t scalable reminds me of something Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky did at Airbnb. They needed great photography of apartments, and the owners’ pictures were terrible. So, they went out and took the photos themselves. This wasn’t scalable, but it gave them confidence that people would click the rent now button when great rental images were on the site.
The Big Takeway
The critical lesson – what matters most in a startup is to gauge demand, even if you have to use paper clips and rubber bands to get things to work.
Building the technology or getting a product made, isn’t job one. Don’t waste money on secondary issues.
The first thing to focus on is to determine if there is demand for your idea. And, you don’t want scalability to get in the way.
I love this phrase – scaling is overrated for startups.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
