Ask HN: How did you 'do things that don't scale' for your B2B startup?

While we were building the MVP for https://pupkeep.com/ we decided to try and not automate anything that we didn't have to so we can ship core features faster.

For instance I was going to build a complicated job system to handle payouts to different company locations, but I realized that until we get thousands of customers I can just send the payouts manually by clicking some buttons in Stripe. A bit tedious but instead of building and debugging that we now have another full feature built out improves our users experience.

The most common types of tasks I've seen are those that fall under business operations. My last company when starting up their B2B side had someone manually set up invoices in Excel and print and mail them to the individual clients. For some clients I've seen people manually enter data instead of automating it (or until the automation is complete). The real trick here is that you don't want to automate the operations until you actually have a product that people are buying. It's not worth investing the time and money into automation unless you know it's going to be used.

Additionally, early on, you're going to want to do some of the sales manually. You're probably going to lean on people you already know to try the product and intros from people in your network. This is more time-consuming than a sales pipeline but it will generally provide better product (and sales) feedback. These customers will also most likely be your most passionate.

For Orchestra, I have and still manually cold call and interview potential customers. I gather email addresses and make it a priority to provide value with the very first email so it's not spammy. This means researching about a prospects' business as opposed to creating a canned email and firing away.

At Yelluw:

- Directly contact people who we want to work with and ask them to subscribe to our newsletter.

- Manually send the newsletter to each subscriber. There are over 120 subscribers at the moment. We do not promote the newsletter en masse. Just 1-1 contacts.

- We do manual prospecting on social media by actively looking for people that fit a given profile. This includes forming a relationship with them and actively work to figure out how we can solve their current business challenges.

All thos takes hours of work every day. But its so worth it. Growth is quickly increasing because we treat people like people and not like money bags with legs.

Im currently developing a system to semi-automate the process. You can se the code here: https://github.com/yelluw/amy

If youd like to subscribe to the newsletter and see for yourself, just visit http://yelluw.com (https incoming).

At the last startup I worked at one thing we did was we manually input data for our customers. The application only really became useful after a time investment by the users to load up their data library, so we would offer to do it for them.

I'm working on a function as a service platform that will eventually proxy to a cluster of worker machines. Currently, I'm not scaling in the most literal tech sense; it runs on a single server until I validate that people will actually use it.

Tesults (https://www.tesults.com) requires integrating with build/test scripts to use it. We will provide manual hands on help with integrations (including writing code) for teams that want us to. It's not very many that ask but we will do it for anyone, including teams on the free plan (the majority).

Don't invest time and money in automating any business process until it's really hurting you. Don't integrate with Stripe until you can't keep up with manual onboarding for billing. Don't automate cloud hosting until you can't keep up with manual provisioning....