Why Small is the New Big: A Brutally Honest Review of Apps That Don’t Scale
Hello everyone. Gather around the startup campfire, because today’s sermon is about killing your darling obsession with scale. Yes, that holy grail mantra of “do things that don’t scale” has apparently been rewritten by our author into a sort of small-is-the-new-big gospel. Except, spoiler: it’s not gospel – it’s a polite resignation letter to the cult of unicorn-building. Let’s dig in.
The Startup Mantra Turned Participation Trophy
Once upon a time, “do things that don’t scale” was the pep talk founders gave themselves when they were duct-taping together their first MVP in a dorm room. The idea was to do the manual grunt work, schmooze users, tweak buttons with bloody fingertips – then eventually automate, grow, and rake in millions. Fast forward to 2024, and apparently, that story arc now ends at phase one: you build something janky for yourself, shrug, and decide it’s good enough. Imagine powering off in the tutorial mode and calling it “the completed game.”
The core thesis here is that GPT-assisted coding makes it ridiculously cheap to cobble together apps for yourself. Great, that’s true. But does that mean every half-baked toy is suddenly noble because you didn’t bother scaling? Absolutely not. That’s like baking half a cake, eating the raw dough, and claiming it’s artisanal cuisine.
Case Study: The Slack That Refused to Grow
The author has a Slack group of about a hundred users, with a dozen or so actually active. Could it be bigger? Of course. Should it? Apparently not. Because intimacy must be preserved! Except, let’s be honest – intimacy vanished the second someone posted their seventh “TGIF meme” gif. Scale kills communities, but let’s not romanticize stagnation. Running a moderately quiet Slack workspace isn’t revolutionary – it’s just glorified group texting with typing indicators.
Some things don’t scale because they’re structurally incapable of doing so, not because growth ruins the “vibe.”
PostcardMailer: The Lazarus Project Nobody Asked For
Next, we have the very charming but utterly impractical PostcardMailer saga. Originally, it sent Insta posts to the author’s mom. Instagram nuked the API, bots ran wild, and eventually, he shrunk it into the simplest solution: email a photo to “mom@postcardmailer.us” and she gets a physical postcard. Cute. Personal. Cool proof-of-concept… for an audience of exactly one person and maybe three nostalgic hipsters. But pretending this is some profound example of resisting scale is laughable. It’s not a rebellion against silicon evangelism; it’s just running away from strangers abusing your app.
The remake as email-only is basically like downgrading from a Switch to a Game Boy Color and declaring it a lifestyle choice. Sure, it “just works” – but let’s not pretend it’s more than a locked-down toy.
The Landline Pill Reminder: DIY Healthcare Simulator
Then comes the Twilio-powered landline reminder app for the author’s mom’s medication. As a doctor (yes, hi there, stethoscope firmly in pocket), I’ll say this: brilliant move for personal use, but thank the stars he didn’t scale it. Because know what scaling would mean? Endless liability lawsuits, HIPAA nightmares, and your inbox flooded with angry kids complaining their moms overdosed because your server went down at 2 a.m. That’s not a side hustle; that’s a malpractice trial waiting to happen. This one wisely gets a gold star for staying small.
The Pattern: Anti-Scale as Philosophy
- See a personal need.
- Build the laziest, smallest app imaginable.
- Refuse to grow or support it further.
- Applaud yourself for staying “small and pure.”
Look, I get it. Not everything needs to scale. Not every app has to cater to Gen Z TikTok addicts and late-capitalist ad networks. But calling this philosophy a new frontier of tech is absurd. Scaling isn’t the enemy; bad design, weak moderation, and pure greed are. Making tools just for yourself is fine, even smart. But it’s not curing cancer, it’s not dismantling surveillance capitalism, and it won’t exactly save the indie app scene from collapsing.
Conclusion: A Quiet Resignation
This essay isn’t visionary; it’s a sigh of relief. It reads like someone rage-quit the growth-at-all-costs game, poured themselves a kombucha, and declared independence from scaling. Frankly, I respect that as a lifestyle choice. But as a “philosophy for modern apps”? Meh. It’s just tinkering: harmless, sometimes delightful, sometimes forgettable. If scale is a boss fight, this guy just stayed in the starter town grinding rats for XP and called it enlightenment.
Overall verdict? Interesting anecdotes, but no revolution here. Small apps are fine – just don’t wrap them in a manifesto about rejecting scale. Sometimes, a toy is just a toy.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.
