Constraints teach you to do more with less

How Money Constraints Help

When we were just starting up in late 2018, I remember spending an absurd amount of time if it meant I could save some money for the company or myself. The uncertainty of not knowing whether our startup will generate any revenue was anxiety-inducing. And the way I dealt with it was to keep our burn rate as low as possible.

What this meant is that I'd spend 5 hours putting together a design element myself as opposed to spending ₹2,500 on Fiverr to get a professional designer to do it for me.

I'd send out cold emails to founders of SaaS tools like Algolia, Zapier, Hotjar, Mixpanel, requesting them to let us be on their paid plans at a concession.

I'd delay buying a new laptop despite it being slow.

Or rather than quickly finalising a restaurant for a team dinner, I'd spend hours talking to various restaurant managers in order to see who is willing to give us the best discounts on our bill.

You could argue that with my overly-frugal approach, 24 year old me didn't realise the per hour value of my time. But that's not the takeaway I've had. In each of these tradeoffs where I didn't spend money to save my time, I ended up learning something valuable. And at some point in the future, these trade-offs paid off in it's own ways.

Not using a professional Fiverr designer helped me get better at design, which helped me eventually put together good enough UI for our product myself. It helped me discover websites like Themeforest where you could get fully coded out admin panels that save a huge amount of development time. You can even get great looking logos for free online.

Writing cold emails taught me how to draft emails that convert well. Taught me that if you never ask, the answer is always no. You'd be surprised how often founders of large companies are willing to help out those that are just starting out.

Working with a slow laptop helped me learn about browser extensions that improved chrome's memory footprint or how I could upgrade my hard disk to an SSD or how it's actually easy to upgrade RAM. Upgrading to SSDs and upgrading RAMs were optimisations we ended up carrying out for most of our company-owned laptops

How Team Size Constraints Help

When we were starting out, we had no designers or frontend engineers. Our tech team consisted of 1.5 engineers and myself - everyone wore multiple hats. The engineers made product and design decisions. I designed and wrote code.

When a nimble 3-person tech team does everything, it moves much quicker than, let's say, an 8-person team with frontend engineers, product manager, designers, backend engineers and an engineering manager.

In smaller teams, one spends far less time dealing with communication related complexities, slow feedback loops, trying to understand context, dealing with emotions, people issues, politics, inter-team dynamics. Which frees up time to focus on what actually makes a difference - listening to user feedback, product thinking, designing and writing code.

Taking another example. In our company, we don't have an HR team that people are meant to go up to with their HR related issues, complaints and questions. Instead we encourage them to talk to Sameer, me or their immediate manager. When it's us dealing with HR issues ourselves, we don't need to pull the "sorry, can't do that cause it's not in our policy" every time. If someone's request has merit, we could implement change easily.

Not having a dedicated HR team also helps us feel connected to everyone in the company. When we have a pulse of the general sentiment of our teammates, it helps us make better people related decisions. We try to solve issues at the root level rather than addressing individual cases.

Moving on to a more general note. A sign that a team has adopted the philosophy of doing more with less is how much they've invested into automations. Automations are necessary if you are resource constrained. "Do more with less" people build automations into everything they do.

If you don't impose team size constraints on yourself, you look at a problem and think of throwing people at it. But if you know you have to make do with what you have, you think about how to optimise the productivity of every individual. As in how to automate away mechanical tasks, leaving more energy and time for only the higher order thinking tasks.

Being constrained teaches you to do more with less.