Royston G. King argues that early startups should build messy, non-scalable solutions first to gain traction, then pivot to scalable models later. Founders often wrongly assume they need a polished, scalable product on day one. Once you have a foothold and a retained team, redesign for the larger market.
But, you know, things are not necessarily going to be perfect on day one. And so one of the, one of the challenges that a lot of people have, especially there's a lot of entrepreneurs who are coming from a larger corporation where everything has been polished and well thought through and, and are kind of through their, their early messy days, is realize that what, what you do on day one does not have to be scalable. And in fact, what you do on day 1 is usually not scalable. A lot of times, the way that you solve the chicken or egg issue with, you know, how do I find capital before I have a company, a lot of times it's about being opportunistic. And, you know, there's a difference between being opportunistic and then being strategic and scalable, right? So opportunistic is you may find a, you know, a unique circumstance where, you can create value. But maybe there's not a clear path to creating scale past that. But if you can find a place to get a little bit of a foothold, to get a little bit of traction, where you can start to build a team, where you can start to retain talent, then once you kind of— once you have that one single thing, that maybe not scalable, not particularly beautiful operation up and running, but enough to be able to sustain your team and gain a little bit of traction, then in the next phase, you can start to think about, all right, well, how do we start to resolve some of the inefficiencies or imperfections? How do we start to think about a larger, more scalable business that's chasing a larger total addressable market? And that's usually when businesses will kind of pivot.
