Doing things that don't scale

This year, I want to go back to focusing on doing things don’t scale. The phrase was coined by Paul Graham in a essay written in 2013 and it’s something that resonated with me back in 2018 when I first joined Secfi.

While written primarily for early stage startups getting off the ground, Secfi is now in it’s second phase where a quick reset is needed. We grew significantly since we started in 2017 through the 2021 bull market, and then have been in a steady state since the market pullback. We’ve launched new business lines and have had to keep things afloat on the existing lines as we waited out the bull market.

Now that we’re in 2024, we’re looking to build off our learnings from the past 6 years and take the company to it’s next phase. That’s where we need to go back to our startup principles and start doing things that don’t scale again.

Paul Graham’s essay can be summarized simply in that to get going as a startup you need to recruit users manually and give them an overwhelmingly good experience. Both of those things don’t typically scale. However, the experience should lead us to a clearer picture of what we need to build and how we should do it.

Secfi is a fortunate position and the last 6 years have given us enough brand recognition that we don’t necessarily have to recruit users manually. However, we do want to put extra focus on delighting our users more and learning from them. That’ll take a lot of work, but it’s worth the time and effort.

I suspect that we’ll look to make significant changes in our processes and products in 2024 and that’s a great thing as we look to improve.