In creative agencies, there is a constant siren song: Scale. We are told to automate our workflows, strictly limit client interactions, and build hands-off systems. The goal is usually to do more with less.
But earlier this year, I came across Paul Graham’s seminal essay, Do Things That Don’t Scale, and it completely shifted my perspective. It changed how I view our relationship with you, our clients, and how we operate at SmatCreative every single day.
The Premise: Why Modern Business Gets it Wrong
The basic premise of Graham’s essay is simple but counterintuitive: For a startup to succeed, the founders must manually do things that cannot eventually be done at scale. Most companies wait for the market to come to them through ads or funnels. Graham argues that you have to roll up your sleeves and pull users in one by one. You have to provide a level of service so intense and so personal that it would be impossible to maintain if you had a million customers. But because you dont have a million customers yet, that personal obsession is your greatest competitive advantage.
Bringing the Unscalable to SmatCreative
Reading that essay was a wake-up call. It made me realize that in our pursuit of professionalism, we shouldn’t lose the scrappiness that builds real relationships.Right now, at SmatCreative, we are intentionally choosing the difficult path. This isn’t a story about our past; it is our current reality.
It looks like:
The Infinite Iteration: While scalable agencies cap you at two revisions, we find ourselves diving into round five or six because the work isn’t quite right yet. We are doing the extra edits not because the contract demands it, but because the vision does.
Manual Deep-Dives: Instead of sending automated forms, we are spending hours on unbilled strategy calls, digging into the why behind your brand.
Radical Availability: We are staying in the trenches with you, responding to those late-night what if ideas, because we know that’s where the breakthrough happens.
Why This Matters for You
You might ask: “Why work this hard on things that don’t scale?” The impact of this philosophy is immediate. By doing the extra, we aren’t just delivering a file; we are earning trust. In an industry often criticized for being transactional, we want to be transformational. We are over-delivering now so that we can build a foundation of excellence that lasts for years.
We’ve learned that trust isnt built through a polished portfolio, it’s built in the 2:00 AM email where we send over a revised concept because we thought of a better way to tell your story.
We are choosing to be unscalable today, so that we can be indispensable tomorrow.