Scrappy With Intention
How intentional scrappiness builds faster companies
TLDR: The founders who get the most out of being scrappy are not the ones who stay scrappy the longest. They are the ones who know when each scrappy decision has done its job.
We have been thinking a lot lately about how we ran Moichor in the early days. What worked, what did not, and what we would tell ourselves if we could go back. A lot of it comes down to one thing: being scrappy with intention.
A question we hear often from founders is some version of “don’t we need this to do that?” They assume they need a certain tool, a certain hire, a certain budget line before they can move forward. Almost every time, there is a way to get it done differently. Cheaper. Faster. With what you already have.
Scrappy is a personality. Some founders have it and some do not. The ones who do find a way through problems that look like walls to everyone else. But scrappy without intention is just chaos with good stories. The real skill is knowing which corners to cut, when to stop cutting them, and how to get better at that judgment every time you get it wrong.
Here is what that looked like for us.
Getting in Front of People Without Spending a Fortune
Conferences in our industry were the obvious place to find the right people, but attending was expensive. Flights, multi-day passes, hotels. For a bootstrapped team, the math did not work.
So we showed up anyway. Not to the show floor. Just to the area around it.
We would reach out ahead of time, let people know we were going to be nearby, and schedule meetings on the side. Coffee in the hotel lobby. A quick chat between sessions. Most people were happy to talk. They were already there, already in the mindset of meeting new companies, and they did not care whether we had a badge or not. The total cost was a plane ticket and a few cups of coffee.
We did the same thing with vet clinics. We would show up with a box of donuts. It was cheap, it gave us a reason to walk in the door, and it made us memorable in a way that a cold email never could. The vet techs and veterinarians loved it. We have since seen other founders take the same approach, slapping their logo on a donut box and spending a day going door to door talking to potential users.
The insight is not “bring donuts.” It is that we made a deliberate call to test whether in-person attention was worth more than a polished campaign. Once we knew it was, we knew exactly what to invest in next.
From meeting attendees in a hotel lobby with no badge or booth, to platinum sponsorship at the same conference. Same event. Very different starting point.
Doing the Work Yourself
At Moichor, we needed thousands of images cropped for our cell labeling work. We could have paid for a tool. Instead, the three of us sat down, set a timer for four hours in intervals, and hand-cropped images one by one. One person would finish their shift and go to sleep. The next person would wake up, sit down, and keep going. Then the next. We rotated like that until it was done.
It was tedious. But it was free, and at that volume it was the right call.
The same thinking applied to how we lived. All three of us stayed in the same apartment. The office was the kitchen and the living room. It sounds like every startup story you have heard before, but it was one of the best moves we made. It consolidated our biggest personal expense into one place, and more importantly, it made us faster. You wake up, walk a few steps, and you are already working. The iteration speed that comes from that proximity is hard to replicate any other way. It also made us closer as a team in ways that carried through the entire life of the company.
Neither of those decisions happened by accident. We knew exactly what we were trading. That is what separates scrappy from just being broke.
Our apartment kitchen was the first lab. We were not trying to build something permanent. We were trying to prove the workflow worked. Once it did, the real lab followed.
When Scrappy Starts Working Against You
All of the above worked because we were intentional about it. Where things got harder was when we held on too long.
When we were scaling our lab operations, we needed equipment. Real lab equipment is expensive. So we did what any scrappy team would do. We borrowed what we could, leaned on connections, bought used gear from startups that were liquidating, and spent weekends at lab auctions picking up things for a fraction of retail.
It worked. We got our operation off the ground for way less than it should have cost. Every dollar we did not spend on a shiny new machine was a dollar we could put toward learning and iterating.
But used equipment is a coin flip. Things broke. Repairs took longer than expected. Some of the gear we bought at a discount ended up costing more in maintenance and downtime than buying new would have. We found ourselves negotiating from a weak position because we were not buying direct, and the time we spent troubleshooting was time we were not spending on the product.
The original decision was right. The timing of when we stopped was the mistake. Scrappy decisions that make sense on day one can quietly become the thing that slows you down on day ninety.
Scrappy Proves the Bet. Then You Fund It.
There is a pattern here worth naming. Almost every scrappy decision we made was really a cheap experiment. We were testing whether something mattered before spending real money on it.
T-shirts are a perfect example. We knew branded shirts could be a great marketing tool, but we had no idea if they would actually move the needle for us. Ordering a few hundred custom shirts from a vendor would have cost thousands. So we made our own. We printed them ourselves, kept the quality good enough, and started handing them out. People wore them. They talked about us. It worked. Once we had proof that shirts were driving awareness and conversations, spending real money on a proper run made sense. But we never would have known that without the scrappy version first.
We did the same thing with lab equipment. Before we had a lab, before we even knew if our workflow would hold up at any real volume, we bought used equipment on the cheap and set it up ourselves. The goal was not to build a lab. The goal was to prove that the workflow worked, that the science translated from theory to practice, and that we could actually process samples in a repeatable way. Once we had that proof, investing in a proper lab setup was an obvious decision.
Scrappy is not the destination. It is the experiment. You use it to build conviction, and once you have conviction, you spend the money. Holding on past that point is not discipline. It is just friction.
The Feedback Loop
This is the part we wish we had understood earlier.
If you find yourself going back to fix something scrappy, that is a signal. It means you held onto it too long. Maybe the equipment should have been replaced two months ago. Maybe the manual workflow made sense when it was just the three of you, but now there are ten people relying on it and it is breaking every week. Maybe your customer base outgrew the duct-tape version and you did not notice until things started falling apart.
Every time that happens, it should change how you approach the next scrappy decision. Not to avoid being scrappy, but to get better at identifying the moment when a particular piece of scrappiness has done its job and needs to be replaced with something real. The first time, you might hold on too long. The second time, you catch it faster. Eventually, you start building with a replacement timeline already in mind.
Scrappy is a genuine advantage. But the founders who get the most out of it use it to move fast, build conviction, and then make the call to replace it before it becomes the thing holding them back. Every scrappy decision becomes a data point for the next one. That is how the judgment gets sharper. And the judgment is the whole game.