Ask HN: Why do people worry about scaling before they actually scale? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do people worry about scaling before they actually scale?

5 pointslenkendall6 comments

I've asked countless entrepreneurs the following question: "Would you rather send 1000 generic emails to prospects to get 10 responses or send 10 personalized emails to get 1 response. Consistently the answer is the first option. This strikes me as arrogant and mathematically flawed, but the counterpoint is that it takes too much time to personalize marketing when attention needs to be paid to the product.

What are your thoughts? I feel like personalization cannot in fact scale, but in the early days it may be the one thing that actually helps you get bigger.

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I'm fully with you on this. In the early days you're scrapping, ziging where others are zagging because you have to differentiate your're self to justify switching costs for your customers, if you're in a competitive environment.

But once you reach scale your goals shift and you're priorities change. I don't think one can fully ignore or embrace customization even at scale, there will be some sense of it present but not as much. There are other factors such as how large your customers are and what business you're in that can affect your decision. But generally we're more lenient towards increasing productivity and efficiency at scale.

This can and should vary depending on the product or service and the goals for the company and any particular campaign. If you're selling complex, personal consulting services, you might find your 10 responses from 1000 generic emails to ultimately lead to zero useful, qualified opportunities. But if you are testing a social, interactive service, you may find that having 10 active users on a given day much more useful than having just 1 person look at your static, deserted interface.

Perhaps, in my examples above, are you trying to land a customer, or are you, in fact, trying to scale something?

No one could argue that sending 10 personalized emails with a high conversion rate is bad, but consider that, depending on the pricing model and aspirations, a business may not be viable unless you can find a way to get customers from mass marketing. If your goal is $100M in revenue (which may or may not be a worthwhile goal, that's a different question) and your price point is $10, that's a lot of personalized emails to write.

your "more inside" isn't quite what i expected. to answer that, i suspect you need to understand what how many targets are available and how much effort is required in each case. if there are "unlimited" targets then the approach that gets most response for a given amount of effort seems logical - and that might be the 1000/10 case (if it's the same amount of effort as the 10/1 case and delivers more responses).

but if you are talking about scaling in terms of technical implementation that i suspect the answer is that it is more fun.

Because they are idiots. Follow your reasoning, it's the correct route.

It's more fun than building the product.

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