If you’re a fan of “Better Call Saul”, chances are you’ve come to appreciate several of the qualities that Jimmy McGill, or, Saul Goodman, possesses. What’s there not to love about Jimmy? What stands out about his character the most is not just that he has a hacker’s mentality (what Paul Graham would phrase as “doing things that don’t scale”), but that he also has incredibly high motivation and drive in doing so. He’s willing to cut corners and do it while running full-speed. I believe that this trait is precisely what startup founders need the most and is something I actively try to have with my own startup Summary Box.

I’ll start off first with why just having a hacker’s mentality, or, “doing things that don’t scale”, is so important. Because when you’re just a small startup, you don’t have the luxury or wherewithal of doing things in a scalable way like large businesses. Therefore, we essentially have to settle for getting users or customers with less-attractive means. As a side note, I’d actually argue that this advice has a more important implication, which is that it turns us into people that are more experimental, therefore utilizing the scientific method more.

However, what makes Jimmy special is that all his effort goes into doing things this way. There are countless examples of this in the show. One of my favorites is in season 2 in the episode named “Fifi” where he pretends that Fudge, a registered sex offender, is a World War 2 veteran so that he can use the airplane in the background for his commercial to advertise for his new eldercare practice.

It’s classic Jimmy. Rather than paying a lofty amount of money to get the chance to shoot his commercial in the location, he devises a clever, albeit deceitful, way of getting it done.

This behavior shows again in season 4 episode 8 when Jimmy’s bodyguard, Huell, is in trouble for hitting a cop over the head and Jimmy uses a bunch of prepaid phones to pretend to be people that support Huell in an effort to paint him as a saint.

When I look at the most successful startups, they all seem to share this kind of singular focus on hacking out experiments. In the early days of Airbnb, the founders literally flew to NYC so that they could shoot photos for their users and improve their listings so that they would sell better. Before Dropbox had any users, it’s founder Drew Houston, posted a video he created and edited himself showing people how to use it, which became a key turning point in getting initial traction.

Now if we look at the Dropbox example, this is clearly “doing things that don’t scale”, but I think what’s not often talked about is also how much effort he put into making the video. There’s nothing professional about it, but you can tell that there is thought behind it and an effort to make it as good as he could with the resources he had. And in fact, this is precisely what Jimmy McGill did with his own self-directed commercials.

So I guess the advice is not just to “do things that don’t scale” but to also put as much time and energy into it as you can. Plenty of founders do things that don’t scale, but not all of them are relentless about it.