Scaling is seductive

I guess Paul Graham in one of his essays has written about this. When I read it, I thought I knew it. But recently when my wife tried her hand on a terrace garden for vegetables, the reality of it hit me hard.

We thought when we load a pot with sand, a mix of compost and cow dung, sow seeds, put them on the terrace open to sky, water them daily we can see plants coming out in each of them and yield at least a couple of brinjals or beans in each pot. This is our basic idea.

So we ordered around 200 clay pots, 12 inches in diameter, a truck load of soil, several sacks of compost and seeds. We got labour to lift all of them to the second floor terrace and lay them out, fill them with all the above and soon within a couple of months we saw plants coming up in all of them.

We are more than six months now and I can tell you out of the 50 pots where we had put in brinjal, we would have got a kilo of brinjal at the max. We thought we will get a kilo per week. Similar thing happened to Ladies finger, Carrots and Radishes.

The plants were there in all sizes, some tall, many short and not fully grown. But barring one or two, almost all of them were just standing there not showing any sign of flowering or giving out veggies. When we sowed the seeds, it was raining a lot, I remember and there were insects eating up everything and the initial growth got stunted in many of them.

We feel after this initial ‘direct build to scale’ experiment that we will now first figure out how to grow plants properly. The thought that plants simply happen has subsided, the scale with which we began makes less sense and we now are going to understand the basics. How to make plants grow properly that will give out veggies.

So we will now limit our experiment to around 20 pots, try out different vegetables and ensure the soil, the compost, keeping insects away, watering adequately, exposure to light etc. are done properly to get the basics right. Scaling can happen later.

Note that we mainly got into this issue because we trivialized the task in hand and thought we can get more output directly. It is true with the product you build as well. For techies, it sounds so simple to build something. They think they can do the most perfect product outright and put it out there. The idea of getting the product market fit dawns later and by that time too much effort has gone in to make a monster and energy is gone in that. Instead less is better when we begin as it helps to focus and getting people interested in the concept with a MVP will get you going in the right direction.

A hair dresser no matter how much effort he spends on making the Saloon look stylish, fails to give a good hair cut, will see no one stepping in for the ambiance.

Well, I know you all nod your heads in agreement for this, but will fail when it comes to doing it and learn the hard way. After all, Scaling is seductive.