590: (Solo) Why You Need to Do Things That Don’t Scale

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Hey guys, welcome back to another solo episode where I share all the lessons that I've learned building founder the past decade to really help you on your journey. It's a short bite-sized episode. So today I want to talk to you about one thing that I first heard about from a guy called Paul Graham. So I make no claim to this one and it's doing things that don't scale. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship.

1:17Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:23So when you're an early stage founder, it is so incredibly important not to try and systematize everything, not to try and automate everything, and not to try and think too much further ahead on your journey. You want to do things that don't scale because this is so incredibly important to get on the ground and get to know your customer, get to find out what's working because that's the magic when you're starting a business. It's really about curiosity, it's really about understanding things and doing things that don't scale because a lot of those things you won't want to scale a lot of these things won't work there's a lot of power when it comes to doing things that don't scale when you're small and this is how you compete literally with large brands so because you don't have a massive team because you don't have a massive budget because you're just starting out this means you can do things that don't scale you can be personal you can do one-to-one and I'm gonna give you some examples on my journey and things that I've seen from super successful founders how they use this approach to really find the gold to effectively work out what to scale.

2:32So let me tell you a quick story and give you an example of this. So when I first started Founder, when we started, you know, setting up an email list and a newsletter and people could sign up and I was, you know, giving away the Richard Branson edition for free and all sorts of things. One thing that I did was that in our auto email responder using MailChimp, the first email I sent to people on automation was, I welcomed you and thank you for signing up to the Founder platform. I talked about our mission. And at the bottom of the email, my call to action was, hit reply. Please respond to me on how we can help you at Founder with your business.

3:07I read every single email. And it was crazy. I did that for the first 12 to 18 months at Founder. And it was amazing to hear the stories of people in our community, how they were finding us why they started to sign up to our email list, how we could help them, where they were struggling. And I was building relationships with people that I'd never met and they somehow found founder and I worked out how to make the product better. And that's a classic example of doing things that don't scale, right? Was it time consuming to read every single email? And over time, eventually I had to turn it off because I was getting, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, hundred plus replies every single day so I couldn't keep up but I learned so much I was able to connect with our early stage community there's people where they poured their heart and soul and told me where they're at with their business and you know how they were going it or where they needed help and I worked out very very quickly where we needed to focus I worked out what people's favorite interviews were I worked out what they liked about the magazine what they didn't like where we could improve things so so so so so powerful so another great example of this is our students, Rena and Flo.

4:21So we actually interviewed them for episode five to five. Make sure you check that out where they made$25 ,000 in their first two weeks. What was incredible was when they launched their product, they went on Instagram and looked for people that just recently got their hair done and they reached out to hairdressers, right? And told them about their incredible product. It's such a really smart strategy, right? So they found people that would be incredible ambassadors for their product. And they just sent a friendly message just introducing who they are, what they do, and how amazing their product is.

4:55It's just no automation, no paid ads, just old-fashioned Instagram DMs and relationship building. And that catalyst was how they grew their brand, right? And they were sending hundreds of messages every single week. And it is so powerful. And they got sales, right? So many people. They're just like, oh, I launched my product. I'm not getting as many sales. like well how many people have you spoken to right how many people have followed your brand that you haven't wrote to how many people liked one of your images you haven't wrote to these are the things you need to do when you're in the early stages of your brand it's exactly what we did with healthish my time-marked water bottle business when we launched that company we did things that didn't scale we looked at all the water bottle competitors we followed people that followed those competitors we follow people that purchase from those competitors and we DM people that followed us or liked images of our product.

5:49And we said, hey, here's a special coupon code. And we got sales every single day. It is so powerful. So you're probably thinking if you're in the early stages of your brand, what can you do? What are the things you can do? Well, you can write handwritten cards. So every single person that purchases your product, write them a handwritten card. DM new followers privately that follow your brand on Instagram, TikTok, or any social media. Follow up with voice notes or video responses. Just the more personal you can be, the better. It goes a long way. You can create custom packages or bundles for certain celebrities or people in your niche or market that are thought leaders and really go out of your way to show that effort that you care.

6:31These are some things that you can do that don't scale that builds an emotional connection because that's what business is all about. It's about building relationships at scale. But in the early days, you don't want to do it at scale. You want to go one-to-one. It's so powerful building that emotional connection. And that's what it takes to get people to talk about your brand. So if you're early in your entrepreneurial career, you've just launched your brand, you're just about to launch your brand, please ask the question, what can I do that doesn't scale? And don't be intimidated by big players.

7:03You can do things that they can't or they're not even thinking about. And this is how you grow this is how people talk about your brand and this is how you find out what works all right i hope you guys enjoyed this as always shoot me a dm at nathan chan or shoot me an email nathan at founder.com i would love to hear what your thoughts are on this episode also guys if you want more help building your brand we have an incredible platform called founder plus you can sign up for a one dollar trial for 14 days it is the all access membership to help you start and grow your e-commerce brand with all the courses community training blueprints tools templates that you need.

7:38So make sure you sign up. We'd love to support you on your journey. All right. I look forward to seeing you on another episode.