Fooled by scalability
What scales, what doesn't, and why this kills you
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Today’s topic is really important, and I’m not sure this is the best way to articulate the concept. Please reply and help me make it better.
What never scales?
Obviously, you & I both want to build businesses that scale.
But when we think about scaling, we tend to do very dumb things… which is probably why YC says “do things that don’t scale.”
I think there’s something deeper here. There’s something that NEVER scales. This thing happens to be the #1 thing that prevents us from finding PMF.
The thing that never scales: How we think about customers.
Here’s what I mean.
From day 1, we’re taught to think about customers at scale: Personas, niches, market segments. If a single human being is N=1, these abstractions are ways to describe N>1, or N “at scale.”
Here’s the challenge: Abstractions never buy products. People do. Nobody ever buys, onboards, or achieves success as a “persona,” a “market,” or as some other abstract N>1 entity.
Why does this matter?
WELL.
Riddle me this, dear reader: Who do you sell to?
I know your answer... you answered some N>1 entity:
“We sell to engineering leaders at startups”
“We sell to the restaurant industry”
“We sell to VPs of design at Fortune 500 tech companies”
In other words, you answered “at scale.”
Everyone always, always, ALWAYS thinks from the starting point of personas, and niches, and/or market segments.
And when we do this, we ask the obvious questions:
What do these [N>1]s care about? What’s their top priority?
What are these [N>1]s pain points and problems?
How can we serve these [N>1]s?
This is why we build stuff people don’t want, don’t you see?
When we start from these “at scale” abstractions, they don’t reflect real humans. We design personas to represent the people we wish existed, or even just “the average of people we’ve talked to.”
These N>1 abstractions never accurately represent the real humans they’re supposed to, in critical ways that make the abstractions counterproductive.
You can guess what happens from here:
We build our marketing to “resonate” with this abstraction (and it confuses and bewilders real people)
We design our sales process to “target” this abstraction (and we wonder why nobody schedules meetings, or buys)
We build our product to “serve” this abstraction (and it’s unusable to real people)
We design our success & delivery process around this abstraction (and onboarding fails, and customers churn)
We are fooled by scalability: These abstractions aren’t real things, they don’t represent reality, but we design our businesses around them and wonder why we can never find pull.
AKA: Our businesses work in theory, but not in practice.
Here is the solution.
The Cure
You stop getting fooled by scalability when you create things for one real person.
This applies to:
Messaging: You can only create non-BS messaging when you write with a single customer in mind. Everything else comes off as dumb, self-absorbed MBA-speak.
Product: Design great product experiences by focusing on one person’s end-to-end experience, not on the theoretical experience of a persona we imagine maybe existing.
GTM: Design GTM to replicate a single case study. Focus on selling to people who look at the case study and say, “yeah, I want that!”
Product-market fit: Get ONE real human being to “hell yes.” Then try to replicate this case study. As you try to replicate the case study, you make the case study better. Approaching it any other way basically guarantees you’ll fail.*
When you design something that works extremely well for one person, you find it works for thousands of others. The more specific you get to one person, strangely, the better it works for others. On the other hand, when you design something that should theoretically work for thousands of people, you find it actually works for nobody.
In my world, this means I am not building my PMF Bootcamp for “pre-PMF founders.” I am building it for Ish. Refining it for Varsha. Improving the experience for Johan. This is the only way I can create something truly great.
So when I ask, “who do you sell to?” please start from ONE, real “hell yes” customer. Expand from there, but don’t start from an abstraction.
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*Product-market fit is an especially unfortunate term because the word “market” is itself an abstraction, and thinking about “markets” prevents you from finding PMF. Perhaps this is why PMF is unnecessarily difficult.