He/she did "things that don't scale". See: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

True, contacting personally people and manually reviewing all the stories is not very scalable. But I believe that's probably the most "lean" way to startup a Startup or Side Project. You start doing things that don't scale then, if you have the luck of getting bigger, you should start automating as much as possible. Giving the response he received, I think this non-scalable start has been absolutely awesome.

But there are lots of ways to automate personalisation :-)

Would be great if you can elaborate more about this :)