Unscalable hacks
Recently I stumbled on the term "unscalable hack", in a blog post by Chris Dixon . This really struck a chord with me because it's a very important concept for many startups but I didn't have a term for it until I read Chris' post. What exactly is an "unscalable hack"? Google doesn't return a lot of useful results and neither does Quora , so let me try to explain it. In the context of programming, using an unscalable hack means programming something in such a way that it works under very specific, limiting conditions (e.g. with very few concurrent users) but won't work with a larger number of users. The advantage of a solution like this is that it doesn't take a lot of time to develop so it saves you money and time, but the disadvantage is that it, well, doesn't scale and that you're accumulating technical debt . In a business context, unscalable hacks are actions that you use to dramatically decrease time-to-market, solve chicken-e...