We stopped building unscalable things, but our most critical societal problems have unscalable solutions.
Competitive swimmers have two ways to improve: getting stronger or swimming better.
Strength is straightforward. You go to practice, work hard, stretch, eat well, trust your training.
Swimming better—improving your technique—is complicated. As a young swimmer, I had to constantly self-advocate for coaches to even look at my stroke.
Growing up and meeting swimmers from across the country, I learned it wasn’t just me: coaches rarely go out of their way to correct an athlete’s technique. I was swimming for a team, but I was working on my stroke alone.1
To train strength, coaches only have to write one practice—it’ll work well for everyone. To train technique, coaches have to spend one-on-one time with every athlete. It’s unscalable.
We stopped doing unscalable things. Big Pharma doesn’t develop new antibiotics because they’re only used for two weeks—driving much less revenue than a drug you’d use for life.2 Top universities stopped accepting low income students, likely because it took too much remedial coursework and support to catch them up.3 Email killed the postal service, Amazon killed the bookstore, and 3G killed landlines, which also probably didn’t help the postal service.4
Can we prove that unscalable things are done less? Let’s look at K12 education.
In 2017, schools spent an average $58 per student on social workers, not much for a role that’s been in schools since the 1920s.5 This number has been relatively stagnant, even moving a dollar lower in 2023 when adjusted for inflation.6 Meanwhile, schools are spending between $280 and $800 per-pupil on education technology today, compared to ~$173 yearly between 1993 and 2003, then considered a massive investment to give every classroom internet access.7 Technology is more scalable (though likely less effective for improving student wellbeing and outcomes) and spending on it has grown faster.8
But we used to spend more money on unscalable things.
A famous and incredibly successful school intervention in 1968 paid parents of at-risk New Haven schoolchildren to meet daily with researchers. Parents learned how schools operate and how they can influence school decisions.9 The method took hold in 500+ schools by 1990 and serves as a theoretical baseline for today's Community Schools, but lost one critical component on the way: Community Schools don’t pay parents.
Despite talking to a researcher part of the original study, it’s unclear to me why this got dropped. It’s now illegal to pay research study participants a contract salary—it’s possible paying parents may run into similar legal complications in schools.10 Regardless of the cause, the high-cost of, well, payments, makes this intervention unscalable.
Many of our most important problems have unscalable solutions. If we want to improve education or student wellbeing, we have to navigate 14,000 school districts, each with their own internal politics, 50 million students with unique needs, 50 different state policy landscapes…No patterns, no scale. And in a negative sum game like education,11 school interventions and social work are not only unscalable, but unprofitable.
Good thing we have nonprofits, right?
I’m starting an education nonprofit and I’m struggling. I spent the past year doing field research at high schools in 15 states. I talked to over 100 students one-on-one, then designed, coded and ran another 100 beta tests on https://fix.school, a platform that shows high schoolers 1,000's of ways to change their school experience, no matter what they’re struggling with.
You pick your problem—gross bathrooms, conflict with a teacher, competitive school culture, or just an assignment you’re stressed about—we give you a Doorstop, a step-by-step solution. Doorstops are a mix of videos, games, email templates you can copy-paste, and student-made playbooks.
My intention is not to solve education. It’s to inspire student agency. To prove to kids they’re not powerless.
The content is free and CC-BY-SA licensed.
But I haven’t been able to find help, and my work is unscalable. Student needs are human needs, and just as varied: no two students I’ve talked to face the same challenges. That’s why I create so many Doorstops—each one requires its own coding, research, design, and user feedback. My thesis is that there are 10,000 problems a high schooler can have, not 10 million—and I can slowly build the 10,000 solutions. Unscalable work, until one day it scales.
What kind of co-founder would partner with me on a project guaranteed to make $0, few prospects for fundraising, and a marketing budget the size of my limited savings?
Struggling with this over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about swimming.
My stagnant, middling technique—and corresponding race performance—only turned around when I started swimming alone between practices. I would swim 3000 meters continuously, 100m catch-up freestyle, 100m perfect technique, never thinking about speed. This was the time I needed to focus on my stroke.
But I wasn’t alone: I had my dad. He drove me to the pool and walked back and forth on deck every lap, getting my split and stroke count every 100 yards. He wasn’t a swimming expert, but he read and watched everything he could to learn about technique and did his best to give me feedback.
My Dad and Goofy.
My stroke improved. At that season’s New England Championships, I showed my best result yet, placing third in the 1500m for my age.
I don’t think I can find a co-founder or much fundraising.12
But I’m writing this to ask for support. If this all resonated with you, email and let me know, or tell me what sucked about high school for you. Leave a comment in the Google doc serving this content. Send me an interesting article you read about education, or share this one with an educator you admire. Put me in touch with a disgruntled teenager near you: I’ll make time to listen to them and help out!
Working on unscalable and unprofitable things usually means working alone. But it doesn’t mean working without support. This is my deepest, most sustaining vocation. I will pursue this rich or poor. Your support would mean the world.
My email is ben@fix.school. Thank you.