What Nobody Tells You About Scaling a Startup: Systems, People, and the Hard Lessons In Between
- May 6
- 3 min read
By Nikki Merkerson
Founder & CEO of Pairgap
Before I became a founder, I spent over two decades in financial services. I helped low- and moderate-income families access mortgages. I built partnerships between a major bank and community organizations across the Northeast. I understood systems—regulatory systems, operational systems, people systems. I thought all of that would make me a natural entrepreneur.
It helped. It also humbled me.
Building Pairgap, a co-buying platform that helps people purchase property together through structured partnerships, taught me that what scales a startup isn't just a great idea. It’s the infrastructure you build early so you’re not scrambling later.
Here's what I've learned.
Build systems before you hire people.
Early on, everything ran through me. Every email. Every decision. Every follow-up. At first, it feels like hustle. It feels like you’re close to the business.
But really, you’re the bottleneck.
I had to build systems out of necessity. Not because I had time, but because I didn’t. I started automating communication, onboarding, and anything repetitive. If I had to do it more than once, I asked myself, “Why am I still doing this manually?”
The goal wasn’t perfection. The goal was to stop being the system.
At Pairgap, we built a proprietary financial compatibility engine — essentially an underwriting model that looks beyond credit scores to assess how well two people can function as financial partners. That engine didn't get built because we had unlimited resources. It got built because we were clear about what problem we were actually solving and committed to building the system that solved it, not just a workaround.
If everything depends on you, you don’t have a business yet. You have a job.
Document your processes before you think you need to. Build the system for the version of the company you're building toward, not the one you're running today.
Hire people who think bigger than the role.
Here’s what I knew about myself: I’m strong in community development, financial services, and building relationships. I am not the best person to architect a cloud platform or design a product interface. So I didn’t pretend to be.
I hired people who were better than me in the areas where I wasn’t strong. My CTO had to understand both the technical architecture and the emotional logic of what we were building. My advisors needed domain expertise, yes—but more than that, they needed to be honest with me when I was wrong.
The first requirement? Big picture thinkers. I wasn’t looking for people who just wanted to execute tasks. I wanted people who could see where we were going and help figure out how to get there.
People who think in frameworks, not just checklists.
I didn’t need more people like me. I needed people who were stronger than me in areas I wasn’t. My background is in community development and financial services. I needed people who knew product design, cloud infrastructure, and legal structures intimately. I was looking for people who would challenge my assumptions, not validate them.
And I’ll say this, early on, I tried to do too much myself before bringing people in. Once I did, things started to move differently.
But not everyone is built for early stage. This stage is messy. There’s no clear playbook. The people who work are the ones who can operate in that and still build.
Scaling early means choosing your constraints intentionally.
Every startup has limited resources. The question isn’t how to do everything—it’s how to choose well.
When we first launched, honestly? We were marketing to the masses. Casting a wide net, hoping something would stick. It didn’t take long to realize that was a waste of energy. So we got intentional.
We identified New York City as our priority market and built our community strategy, our partnerships, and our user acquisition efforts around that single focus. Not because we didn’t have vision for other markets—we absolutely did—but because diluted effort produces diluted results. Focus is a growth strategy.
We also made a decision to grow through trust, not just technology. Before the Pairgap app even existed, I wrote a co-buying guide called “Pair’d” and built over 100 community partnerships through events and financial education workshops. That wasn’t marketing. That was infrastructure. By the time we had a product to scale, we had an audience that already trusted us.
The founders who scale well aren’t the ones who move fastest. They’re the ones who build the right foundations first—even when it’s slow, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when investors want to see the hockey stick before the bedrock.
Build the bedrock.
Connect With Nikki
Instagram: @nikki.merkerson
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