No, I don’t want to grow my business

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Whenever I discuss my startup with someone, I get asked how I am going to “scale” my business. My usual response is that I am happy with its current size and don’t plan on expanding. The looks I get after this exchange make it seem like I’ve either badmouthed a universally loved celebrity or confessed to a horrible crime.

Let me give you some background; I run an affiliate marketing business with my husband. We have four employees. We promote online coupons of different e-commerce sites on search engines and receive a commission every time a customer redeems it.

It’s a small gig. It’s relatively simple. And it’s been this way for nearly five years now. Perhaps it’s the last bit that annoys a lot of my peers the most.

Five years is a long time for a startup. I should be looking to expand, go public like some of my competitors, or even more ambitiously — eyeing the cover of the Forbes magazine.

But I want none of these things and I will tell you why.

I like my tiny company

Business owners are obsessed with growth. But not a gradual growth that companies usually experience. They want to SCALE FAST. This sentiment has given birth to an army of influencers with each one promising to have a secret scaling formula through their clickbait articles.

But is it necessary to relentlessly pursue growth? I would argue otherwise. Now, I will not go all philosophical or give you a lecture on minimalism. Instead, I will make a simple argument:

Organizations become much more complex as they scale. Ultimately, you would have to hire more employees, work with freelancers, and partner with other businesses. Some of this would require you to give up personal control.

As someone who has worked in major corporations and dealt with ridiculously complex hierarchies, I would never want my company to transform into something similar. More importantly, I don’t want a “ Chief Identity Consultant ” walking around my office without knowing what their job is and why I hired this person in the first place.

The little workforce I have performs exceptionally well. I know what each employee brings to the table. This isn’t remotely possible with a big workforce.

I get to help out other businesses

Most entrepreneurs want to be a force for good. We hope to bring about a positive change through our ventures even though the scale of this change might be different.

Admittedly, I am not one of those geniuses that are revolutionizing medicine or creating sustainable energy solutions. But my business model allows me to do something for the community.

As I explained before, I do work in the e-commerce space but don’t sell anything of my own. Instead, my website promotes coupons and promo codes of different online stores. It’s a form of affiliate marketing that has gained significant traction in recent years.

With the current status of my business, I can promote small businesses, particularly those run by women and minorities. We can prioritize these companies and even be lax when it comes to commissions.

Scaling would require us to put money at the forefront and work with industry leaders. In other words, it would suck the soul out of my business.

I get to better rather than bigger

Whenever I explain my nefarious plan of not scaling, one question is constantly thrown my way; “How do you stay motivated ?” The answer is simple; I am striving to make my company better and not bigger. There is a difference between the two.

Bigger businesses don’t necessarily provide the best of services. They’re just able to reach more people and able to serve a larger clientele.

What I hope to create is a business that is efficient, innovative, and above all, able to manufacture impactful solutions. These solutions might not reach everyone but that’s beside the point. Getting this right will reflect well on the bottom line as it has for me in the last five years.

If my business grows as a by-product of this then I wouldn’t go out of my way to stop that. However, growth is and will never be the ultimate objective for me.

I make enough money

I know what you’d be thinking; “ enough money? ENOUGH MONEY?”THERE’S NO SUCH THING. You’re either in it to kick Jeff Bezos off the top or you can pack your stuff and go home.”

Once again, I would like to provide a different perspective. Money is a great thing. It’s the primary reason we do this business. It pays the bill and lets us buy cereals for our kids.

However, there’s a point at which money becomes an obsession . You start valuing your work through a number and not before long, it’s all about increasing this number at the cost of your health and personal well-being.

My husband and I have a specific income target for each month. Other than the office rent, employee salaries, and our personal expenses, the amount needs to be enough for us to save for the future and take a nice trip to Tahiti every once in a while. There’s no point in working our backsides off for more.

But hey, that’s just my opinion

I will leave this little disclaimer at the end; this is just my opinion . Different entrepreneurs have different motivations. If you’re someone that’s looking to scale then that’s completely fine. I don’t look down on you and wish you nothing but the best.

What I wish to explain is that business owners who choose to stay small are neither lazy nor uninspired. They are simply motivated by things other than growth.

Businesses CAN choose to stay small and there’s nothing wrong with that. So if you’re happy running a small gig; find comfort in knowing that there’s more of us out there.

Why no-code tools in startups should remain niche

No-code is a broad term. It describes a vast set of products that help end-users assemble web pages and applications without hiring developers.

In recent years, it has also become an ideology of sorts (praised, for example, in this Forbes column ): a promise to get rid of all complications that are intertwined with IT development — its proverbial high costs, unpredictability, and difficulty to scale the teams fast enough.

However, I’d argue the promise is often exaggerated, as the proposed approaches are oversold and/or not particularly new. Still, niche solutions from the no-code toolbox might get your tasks in certain pipeline parts done surprisingly well.

So let’s pick apart the ideology and get into what startups and businesses should consider when thinking about no-code solutions.

No-code is not particularly new

Speaking of no-code, we usually think of it as a recent development, a step made in the late 2010s to emancipate the world from expensive engineers. Be it Notion, Mailchimp, Voiceflow, or Bubble, companies associated with no-code approaches are usually recently found startups. But is the approach actually that recent?

In fact, no-code-like tools were there from the very beginning of the computer era. Take Microsoft Excel: it’s basically a way to embark on visual point-and-click methods to create a simple database instead of using SQL. Or any graphical operating system like Windows, Mac OS, or Ubuntu: they give users a command line functionality combined with visual means, without the need to learn code-like commands.

This point also perfectly illustrates the limitations of no-code. It is no coincidence that most operating systems still have a command line-based core and give their power users access to it: some things are just intrinsically difficult to visualize.

Yes, a lot of people don’t touch the Mac OS X Terminal and never will, but in most cases, somebody terminal-savvy needs to be around to perform any actions above a certain level of complexity.

No-code limits patterns of thought

The visualization and simplification, these pillars of no-code, come at a price: no-code tools usually nudge a client to a limited number of patterns — in fact, that’s exactly what allows them to get rid of the code.

Say, only a certain number of product management techniques go hand in hand with no-code task management tools such as, say, Trello. As a result, the idea itself might become stale.

The problem with patterns is that they deny you the possibility of learning. A salesperson can’t become an expert in business only by using landing page presets. The code usually gives you almost infinite possibilities of configuring the system (open-source culture and the competition of approaches, programming languages and libraries usually guarantee it in any given field).

It might not be that important for the first project, but crucial for the growth and future of any professional. There are some domains such as computations or high-load systems performance where you can not simply ‘no-code’ your way out of complexity. That’s why I and my team at Readymag try to avoid staleness at all costs in our solutions, never limiting our users to presets, always giving them access to a clean canvas. We also give our users tools for coding.

Good tools have precise scope

However, I firmly believe that no-code approaches are great when it comes to a narrow-scope task. Take Zapier, a tool for API integration, that we actually use in Readymag; or Airtable, a tool to automate the creation of CMS.

The idea here is not to waste your time on something that can be easily automated and configured, still use the power of engineering for the necessary parts.

Another example is specialized e-commerce tools such as Stripe or Ecwid. Instead of creating our own e-commerce sub-tool, we at Readymag have integrated them. We try to leave each part of the pipeline to the specialized tool, be it code or no-code.

And we think of Readymag as another such tool — a web editor, great for interactive graphics and interactive UX, but possibly powered up with additional APIs or custom code for larger and more complex projects . A full-fledged no-code approach is limiting, but a specific no-code tool might significantly increase your development process.

Summing it up — never buy into no-code as a mantra, but always keep an eye out for its niche practical uses.