Last year I shared some thoughts on doing things that don’t scale. In that case it was about invoicing, but I’ve seen this idea continue to pop up.
Lumpy Mail
The first is the idea of sending “lumpy mail”. It’s easy to send 1000 emails, and rather easy to send 100 letters in the mail, but it’s much more work to send actual items of value in the mail.
In our case, we try to send mail that stands out from others. These aren’t sent 100 at a time or even 10 at time, but rather individually as the need arises. In our case, we often send books, many times we send people both “Building a Storybrand” as well as Robert’s “The Story Cycle“.
While it’s a good bit more work to do that, I keep plenty of copies of both on hand, along with envelopes ready to go, and the UPS store is very close to my house. So far it’s worked very well!
Supernatural
I’ve talked before about the VR fitness app that I use called Supernatural, and I saw something interesting on their Facebook group a few days ago. Someone lamented that the automated “congratulations” video from the coaches didn’t appear after they hit a milestone, so one of the coaches gave her a quick custom video congrats in the comments right there.
You may be able to see the post at this link, but if not here is a screenshot of the coach leaving his video in the comments.
Even though it’s just a 10 second video, it doesn’t scale. There are 88,000 people in that group, and tens of thousands more that use the app. They couldn’t possibly do this for everyone. However, that video reached hundreds of people and impressed most of them (myself included).
Scale and automation is essential for growing a business, but continuing to do things that can’t scale will always create more goodwill for what you’re doing.
