49. Six reasons to delay automating processes in your startup as long as possible

I have talked to many founders about automating business processes and why they should put that off as long as possible. You may have heard the Y Combinator mantra “do things that don’t scale.” Usually, they discuss that in terms of sales or support, but we rarely talk about the idea with respect to software and automation. We need to understand the value of doing things by hand in the early stages of a business.

In this episode, I explore the kinds of automation you may want to defer with some specific examples. I then share the six primary ways that performing these processes manually, in the beginning, can provide value to the business and avoid unnecessary costs.

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Founders often have a strong bias towards action. When you see that some process will eventually need to be automated, you may want to do it immediately. In most cases, I suggest that you hold off and go with “mantomation” at first. Mantomation is what I call it when you fake your automation using people.

Users want results. They don’t care if some sophisticated software is doing the magic or a box of hard-working hamsters. It is the result that counts, and it does not matter if they need to “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

I am not suggesting that automation is bad or that you should not do it at all. In my examples, the companies all eventually make heavy use of software processes. My advice is to wait until the last possible moment before you start that development. When the manual approach is strained to the limit, and you have squeezed all possible information from working directly with the data and customers, then start automating.