FWIW the way I conceptualise this situation is that cost effectiveness is still king, but: spending a dollar is a lot less expensive in terms of ‘true cost’ than it used to be, because it implies the inability to fund another thing to a greatly reduced extent (which is the real cost of spending money).
This in turn means that spending time/labour to find new opportunities is relatively more expensive than it used to be vs. the true cost of spending a dollar, which is why we want to take opportunities that have a much larger dollar spend:labor/time ratio than we used to.
If an opportunity is not scalable, that means it has a lot of labour/time costs that are hidden, because once you use up the opportunity you have to find another one before you can keep having impact, which costs labour/time, whereas scalable opportunities don’t have that. Therefore they’re cheaper in true cost, therefore more cost effective at the same level of effectiveness.
I don’t think I’m disagreeing with you—but this feels like the conceptually cleaner way of thinking about it for my brain.
FWIW the way I conceptualise this situation is that cost effectiveness is still king, but: spending a dollar is a lot less expensive in terms of ‘true cost’ than it used to be, because it implies the inability to fund another thing to a greatly reduced extent (which is the real cost of spending money).
This in turn means that spending time/labour to find new opportunities is relatively more expensive than it used to be vs. the true cost of spending a dollar, which is why we want to take opportunities that have a much larger dollar spend:labor/time ratio than we used to.
If an opportunity is not scalable, that means it has a lot of labour/time costs that are hidden, because once you use up the opportunity you have to find another one before you can keep having impact, which costs labour/time, whereas scalable opportunities don’t have that. Therefore they’re cheaper in true cost, therefore more cost effective at the same level of effectiveness.
I don’t think I’m disagreeing with you—but this feels like the conceptually cleaner way of thinking about it for my brain.