There's a question that hangs over everything I build: "But will it scale?" It comes from well-meaning people. It comes from the tech industry's gravitational pull towards growth, towards metrics, towards the assumption that anything worth building must eventually reach millions. And every time I hear it, I have the same answer: I hope not.
I don't build for scale. I build for use. I build a pub guide because I want to know where to drink in London. I build a tube exit guide because I'm tired of standing in the wrong spot on the platform. I build a weekend activity directory because I have a young son and Saturday morning needs a plan. These things don't need a million users. They need to work. They need to be good. They need to solve the specific, human-scale problem they were made for. That is enough.
This is an argument for the small internet. Not the startup internet. Not the VC internet. Not the "we need to reach product-market fit and then scale aggressively" internet. The small, personal, considered internet where someone builds a thing because they need it, makes it as good as they can, puts it online, and doesn't worry about whether it'll go viral. That internet still exists. It's just harder to see because everyone is looking at the big one.
The beauty of ten users
First Out is a guide to London tube exits. It tells you where to stand on the platform - front, middle, or back - so you're near the exit when the doors open. That's the entire product. It serves a narrow, specific need that anyone who rides the tube will recognise. And it doesn't need to scale to be valuable. If ten people use it on their daily commute and save a few seconds each time, it has justified its existence. If a hundred people use it, wonderful. If a thousand, great. But the product doesn't change based on the number. It's already complete at ten.
This is what I mean by the small internet. Products that are complete at small numbers. Products whose value comes from their specificity, not their reach. A pub guide for London doesn't become more useful if it covers every pub in Britain. It becomes less useful. Its value is in the curation - the fact that someone who lives here and drinks here has selected these specific pubs and told you why they matter. Scale would destroy that. You would need to add pubs you've never visited, write descriptions based on research rather than experience, turn a personal recommendation into a database. The thing that makes it good is the thing that keeps it small.
Against the VC mental model
The venture capital model has infected how we think about building online. Everything is evaluated through the lens of potential scale. Every side project is a "startup in disguise." Every tool you make for yourself is "an MVP that just needs distribution." This framing is poisonous because it makes you feel like anything that doesn't grow is a failure. And that feeling stops people from building the most interesting things - the small, personal, idiosyncratic things that nobody would fund but everybody would use if they knew about them.
I built Oishii London - a Japanese restaurant guide for London - because I love Japanese food and I wanted a good list of places to eat. Not a Yelp clone. Not a comprehensive review site. A personal, opinionated, curated list of Japanese restaurants that I would actually recommend. The audience for that's small by definition. It's people in London who care about Japanese food and trust a stranger's recommendations. That might be a few hundred people. That is fine. That's the audience it was made for.
In the VC mental model, Oishii London would need to pivot. Expand to other cuisines. Add user reviews. Integrate booking. Build a loyalty programme. Raise a seed round. Hire a team. Scale internationally. And in the process of all that scaling, the thing that made it interesting - one person's considered, taste-driven recommendations - would be completely destroyed. The scaling would kill the soul.
Small things, well made
There's a craft tradition in Japan called monozukuri - the art of making things. Not mass-producing things. Making them. With care, with intention, with attention to details that most people will never notice. A bowl isn't mass-produced - it is made. A knife isn't manufactured - it is forged. The value is in the making, in the human consideration embedded in every decision.
The small internet is monozukuri for the web. Every site I build is handmade in the sense that matters - every design decision is considered, every piece of content is deliberate, every colour and font and layout choice reflects a specific point of view. Little London - a weekend activity guide for parents in London - isn't better because it has more listings than a commercial directory. It's better because every listing is there for a reason. Because I've taken my son to these places. Because I know which ones are worth the journey and which ones aren't. The human consideration is the product.
Forest Quiz is a Nottingham Forest trivia game. The audience for that's, charitably, a few thousand people in the world - Forest fans who enjoy quiz games online. In the VC model, that isn't a viable product. In the small internet model, it's a perfect product. It serves a specific community with something made with genuine love and knowledge. The people who find it are delighted by it, not because it's trying to be the next big thing but because it's trying to be the best possible version of exactly what it is.
The economics of small
Here's the thing nobody tells you about building small: it is nearly free. I host all my projects on Netlify's free tier and Cloudflare Pages. The total cost of running fourteen live websites is approximately zero pounds per month. No servers to maintain. No infrastructure to scale. No DevOps team to hire. Just static files served from a CDN, fast and reliable and free.
This economic reality is revolutionary and nobody talks about it. For the first time in the history of the internet, you can build and host a professional-quality website for literally nothing. No hosting costs. No bandwidth costs. No infrastructure costs. The only cost is your time and taste. And that changes the calculus of what is worth building. When the cost of building is zero, the threshold for "worth it" drops to the floor. A website that helps ten people is worth building if it cost nothing to make and nothing to run. The economics of small are the economics of freedom.
Contrast this with the startup model, where you need to raise money before you build, spend money while you build, and then generate revenue after you build - or die. The small internet has no death. There's no runway to run out of. There's no board to disappoint. There are no investors expecting returns. There's just a thing that exists on the internet, doing its job, costing nothing, available to anyone who needs it. That's a beautiful economic model. It's also the most sustainable one.
Personal isn't a limitation
The objection I hear most often is that personal projects are "just" personal. They aren't "real" products. They don't count because they don't have users or revenue or growth metrics. This is the VC infection talking. The implication is that a product only has value if it can be measured, monetised, and scaled. By that logic, a hand-written letter has no value because it only reaches one person. A home-cooked meal has no value because it only feeds a family. A photograph stuck on a fridge has no value because it has no engagement metrics.
The personal isn't a limitation. The personal is the point. The London Pub Guide is good because it's personal - because someone who actually drinks in these pubs wrote about them from experience rather than research. First Out is good because it's personal - because someone who actually rides these tube lines knows where to stand. Little London is good because it's personal - because someone who actually takes his son to these places knows which ones are worth the trip.
Strip away the personal and you get TripAdvisor. You get Yelp. You get Citymapper. You get products that are comprehensive but generic, that cover everything but recommend nothing, that have millions of users and zero personality. The internet doesn't need another comprehensive database. It needs more people building small, personal, considered things that reflect a genuine point of view.
A manifesto for small
So here's what I believe. I believe the internet is big enough for small things. I believe a website that serves ten people brilliantly is more valuable than a platform that serves ten million people adequately. I believe the personal isn't a limitation but a superpower. I believe the best products come from genuine need, not market analysis. I believe taste matters more than scale. I believe you should build the thing you want to use, make it as good as you can, put it online, and not worry about whether it'll grow.
I believe the small internet is the real internet - the one that existed before venture capital and growth hacking and user acquisition funnels turned every website into a startup pitch. The internet of personal pages and niche communities and handmade tools and one-person projects. That internet never died. It just got drowned out by the noise of the big one.
Every project I build is a small act of faith in this idea. A pub guide. A tube exit guide. A restaurant directory. A weekend planner for parents. A quiz about my football team. None of these will make me rich. None of these will "scale." All of them will exist on the internet, doing their jobs, serving the people they were made for, costing nothing to run, asking for nothing in return. That's the small internet. And I'll keep building it, one tiny, considered, personal thing at a time.
