Do things that don’t scale, and then don’t scale Adam Derewecki 3 min read · 5 hours ago 5 hours ago -- 2 Listen Share
A little over a decade ago, Paul Graham popularized “Do things that don’t scale.” The idea was: at first, you do the scrappy, personal, labor-intensive stuff just to get traction… and then you figure out how to make it huge.
But with GPT-assisted coding, I think we’re in an era where you can just stop after the first part. You can do something that doesn’t scale — and leave it that way. That might actually be the best version of it.
The cost to build is so low now. Something that once took me a few weekends can be spun up in an evening with Cursor open. And I don’t feel the pressure anymore for every project to be “a business.” If it works for me — or a tiny circle of people I care about — that’s enough.
The Slack That Shouldn’t Get Bigger
I run a Slack workspace with about a hundred people in it. Fifteen or twenty are active in a given week. It’s not like everyone knows each other’s life story, but they’ve been around long enough to feel comfortable sharing things they wouldn’t post on Twitter. It’s private. There’s no public feed, no upvotes, no lurking masses.
Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better.
Some things work precisely because they’re small.
PostcardMailer, Take Two
Years ago, I built a little site that mailed a postcard every time I posted to Instagram. It would grab the photo, grab the caption, and send it through a direct mail API to my mom. It was perfect — until Instagram killed the part of their API that made it possible.
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