How to Think Like a Startup to Stay Scrappy and Resourceful
How to Think Like a Startup to Stay Scrappy and Resourceful
October 29, 2025
Best Practices, Marketing
SMBs compete best on speed, agility, and transparency.
Aspen Egan grew up at Blip—and Blip has grown up right alongside her.
In the last 6 years, Aspen has gone from HR intern to Senior Manager of Business and People Operations. In that time, she’s helped see the company through huge periods of growth. She’s overseen the design of a custom performance management platform that rivals enterprise solutions at zero cost. And she’s helped navigate a major restructuring, with zero voluntary turnover in the year that followed.
It’s classic startup life: big changes, big opportunities, and the scrappiness needed to handle both. As Aspen explains, “SMBs have to be resourceful if they want to survive, and especially if they want to scale.”
As a small business serving other small businesses, Blip experiences the same growing pains and resource constraints as many of its customers. Aspen finds that building Blip’s internal processes helps her better understand users at a similar stage of business life.
“When any SMB comes to Blip, they’re looking for an advertising solution that’s cost-effective, and that will grow with them,” she says. “That’s the same mindset I bring to building our own business operations.”
If you’re an emerging business, enterprise “best practices” aren’t going to serve you at your stage of growth. What will really move the needle is resourcefulness—knowing where to start when you have limited people, time, and money.
Avoiding the “Best Practices Trap”
Albert Einstein famously said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
This applies for startups too.
Many SMBs look to enterprise frontrunners for inspiration when they’re setting up their business and people operations—and end up creating more problems than they solve. Because at that stage of your business, you aren’t an enterprise. You’re a fish.
Aspen felt this disconnect firsthand when she set out to help design Blip’s performance management processes.
“We experimented with a few different platforms, and found a lot of them were expensive and elaborate in a way that didn’t match Blip’s culture,” she recalls. “We were just this scrappy little startup. We didn’t need all that.” (More on what Blip ended up building instead below.)
Aspen finds that keeping a “lean startup mindset” serves her better than enterprise best practices ever could. To her, that means relying on 4 basic principles:
We pilot small with an initial experiment
We evolve based on feedback, using learnings to make adjustments
We test quickly with fast, iterative variations of adjustments
We only scale what works, doubling down only when something’s proven
This approach helps her hold onto the resourcefulness that makes startups successful, while still leaving room to grow.
The 4 Pillars of a Lean Startup Mindset
“We pilot small”
Rather than trying to launch sweeping new efforts, Aspen recommends focusing on building minimum viable systems that solve immediate problems, without over-engineering.
“Anytime we launch something new, we pilot small,” she explains.
“I’m not afraid to launch something slightly half-baked and let employees know, hey, we think this will help our company, but we want your feedback too.”
When she decided to bring Blip’s performance management system in-house, she started simple. “We began with Google Forms and manual calendar invites—it was very, very scrappy—before we evolved into our fully automated platform today.”
Even small improvements ladder up into greater successes. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming professional growth requires professional-grade (read: complex and expensive) systems.
Startups that over-engineer their operations lose the agility that often made them successful in the first place, creating red tape instead of incremental wins.
“We evolve based on feedback”
Piloting small gives you the ability to take in feedback, test quickly, and evolve. Treat internal input from employees as seriously as you take external feedback from customers. Systems that capture this feedback might include:
Regular pulse surveys
Engagement surveys and response rates
Weekly business reviews with performance metrics
All-hands meetings with open Q&A sessions
Manager one-on-ones with structured feedback processes
Exit interviews
For example, Aspen found that the feedback on the first iteration of Blip’s peer review portion of the internal performance review system was swift—and unfavorable.
“Initially, I thought we needed really in-depth questions and a lengthy survey to get good peer feedback for performance reviews,” she explains. “This absolutely flopped.”
Turns out, overly complex processes made employees dread the review process—and led to surface-level answers to a lot of questions, instead of deep answers on the couple of questions that really mattered.
By paying attention to response rates and qualitative feedback from employees, Aspen was able to adjust course.
“We test quickly”
Speed is the ultimate advantage SMBs have over bigger players. Don’t lose sight of that competitive edge.
Starting with small, data-driven tests means you can launch, observe, analyze, and iterate on your business strategy quickly. Rapid feedback loops prevent expensive mistakes and surface real problems quickly.
“With the long version of our survey, we were only getting like 50% participation for peer reviews,” says Aspen. “When we simplified things down to two questions, the results were immediate. We saw a 91% response rate”
Once you’ve gathered feedback, be swift to make adjustments.
Does this solve a real problem that Blip has right now?
Will this work at 2 times the headcount?
Can it evolve without requiring massive rework or budget?
If the answer is yes, yes, and yes, she goes for it.
A streamlined performance management system was easy to commit to. Aspen explains, “It solved our peer feedback problem right away, it worked with our then-25 employees, and I knew it would still work with 100+ employees.”
Very quickly, Blip went from 20% completion rates and surface-level reviews to a system where every employee was receiving thoughtful, actionable feedback that made the whole company better.
“This ‘only scale what works’ approach lets us really hone in on what’s working now, and what will continue to work in the future, as opposed to going crazy testing 10 different initiatives,” says Aspen.
“Finding one solution that met 90% of our needs was so much more effective than being scattered across different systems.”
As is often the case, less was more.
For SMBs, having fewer, integrated systems beats out juggling multiple “best-in-class” solutions. It’s an approach that reduces cognitive load, reduces cost, and multiplies effectiveness.
Strategic Principles for SMBs
A scrappy startup mindset will continue to serve your business long after you’ve left your “scrappy startup” era.
“Even as you grow, and you do get access to more resources, staying in that lean mindset is so helpful,” says Aspen.
For leaders at growing businesses who want to keep a lean startup mindset alive, she recommends a few strategic principles to keep in mind:
Spend time instead of money. What many SMBs lack in cash, they can make up for with attention.By taking the time to build a bespoke performance system, Blip was able to save on costly solutions and iterate quickly, without vendor limitations. Building in-house makes for systems that fit like a glove.
Use AI to scale your one-person armies. Aspen is the sole HR leader for almost 40 employees across 14 states. To manage, she uses self-service AI systems to multiply individual capacity, leaning on tools to handle more mundane daily tasks around compliance.
Treat transparency as a competitive advantage. Along with speed and agility, transparency is one of the biggest advantages an SMB can have over enterprise competitors. Radical transparency, especially during difficult times that every small business faces, builds unshakeable trust.
For example, in the 12 months following Blip’s major restructure, there was zero voluntary turnover—a stat Aspen largely attributes to open Q&A sessions, transparent management, and a culture that emphasized company values to help employees feel unified.
Culture lives in hiring. At a small business, every employee has an outsized impact on culture and morale. You can’t just build culture after the fact; you have to bake it into your process for bringing people on board.
“At Blip, we have a set of behavioral norms that define our culture. Things like we put customers first, we work well together, we dive deep,” Aspen explains. “We’ve found that questions that assess how well candidates fit those culture norms are equally, if not more important, than the tactical skills.”
When you’re in those early building stages, resourcefulness is the name of the game.
But for Aspen, there’s an added benefit: her lean startup mindset helps her build empathy and real connection with Blip’s SMB customers, who are also navigating that scrappy startup stage.
