

Manual Scaling - jaf12duke
http://42floors.com/blog/manual-scaling/

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randall
We have a product for TV stations that helps them take social media
(instagram, fb, twitter text and images) and show it as a part of their
broadcasts. One of the most difficult parts is getting the custom design from
the station into our system, because there's a huge learning hurdle if the
station designer has to learn our software. So rather than build software that
will a) be shitty at first, and b) create new roadblocks, we instead chose a
different route which is described here: Manual scaling.

They send us a PSD, since they'd already use photoshop to create the look. We
then manually convert it into our system.

It sucks because it's definitely going to become a weak point of scaling out
our system, but till we hit that weak point, we keep going. We've slowly
started to build out the design system just to make our lives simpler, and we
imagine outsourcing this task to other people outside our company, which means
hopefully once we expose it to users, the interface will be simple enough.

Just wanted to add our perspective of this. I think a lot of people don't
realize what you can do by hand. The only reason why I thought of doing this
is because of Aardvark.

<http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262666394>

I happened to have been working for Justin.TV and was lucky enough to record
that. Otherwise, I bet I'd have been going down the "build it all first!"
route.

All the other videos:
[http://lanyrd.com/coverage/?domain=justin.tv&page=2&...](http://lanyrd.com/coverage/?domain=justin.tv&page=2&coverage=video)

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kellros
The obvious thing that is being missed is that manual 'scaling' would most
probably result in higher quality data. I would consider this critical for
data sensitive businesses.

One of my clients I do some consultation work for from time to time actually
prefer the manual process. It allows them finer grained control to better
manage the quality of data/advertisements because the majority of what they do
involves graphic art. They have effectively turned manual scaling into a
competitive advantage.

I sincerely doubt they will always prefer this route - but at the moment it
seems like the best approach (until all their clients are computer savvy and
solely work with artists and not try to make a flyer or the like themselves
with Microsoft Paint).

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startupstella
A great point not mentioned here is that if you've hit the ceiling where
manual scaling no longer works...that's a good thing! That probably means you
have enough resources due to successful hustling to devote to making things
more efficient.

