What's something that you did early on in the product lifecycle that was effective but not scalable?

Hey Chris, this is a fun question, curious if you will use the data for an article or something. That said, something we had to do for LOOFT (check my links for context) was 3D printing our designs and buying existing units to re-purpose for our prototype. In hardware these types of work-arounds are essential. We also may have to manually add all of the sensors we are planning to put into our units, as our manufacturing partner is currently fighting with us on expanding out their PCB to accomodate more sensors. Not scalable for the long run, but we want our customer and product to be the best it can be, so we'll have to put in the work to make it happen for our early believers.

Not my personal experience, but one of the big things I see is homegrown in-app feature announcements or onboarding. It works, but not scalable as you grow.

Handwritten note with a sample posted in the mail....I cannot tell you how profoundly important this was for sales conversion. Impactful, personal and wildly effective. But not scalable. I could do a few hundred and luckily that is all I needed! If you only have a small prospect list and it suits your product, give it a try and see just how amazed people will be...even more so today when post and personal are almost dead...stands out.🙂

We tried affiliate marketing with high commissions of 50%–60%; while it was successful initially, it was unsustainable over the long term. After a few months, we realised that in order to scale, we needed to concentrate on the top 10 affiliates while lowering the commission for the remaining affiliates.

Google Advertising ;-)