Startup growth - Techniques - Scalability
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Product. Conversion. Scale. | Stubbleblog
If you don’t have a lot of time, this is what I’m trying to say with this post: prove your product in the small, then prove your business model in the small, then aggressively rinse and repeat in the large. Think about Facebook starting at Harvard, then going after a few other colleges, then going large. People, including me, often want to go product idea, press, product development. This is exactly what I did with CrowdVine, which first appeared on TechCrunch as a un-validated idea backed by a half-working product. I got exactly one positive out of the TechCrunch post: I felt validation that I was, in fact, running a startup. Post coverage, we changed our logo, our design, and pivoted from social-networks-for-anything to social-networks-for-events.
For a while now the folks at the Startup Genome Project have been doing some excellent data driven work into what drives success and failure at startups, and earlier this year I wrote about their first report under the headline The ingredients for a successful startup . Yesterday they followed that up with the release of a mini-report on premature scaling (download here ). According to their data 70% of startups scale prematurely in one of the what they see as the 5 core dimensions of a startup: Customer, Product, Team, Business and Financials, although most problems come when the team dimension is scaled too early. As well as a new report, the Startup Genome Project also released a benchmarking tool designed to help companies avoid the mistakes of premature scaling. I have said many times that too much money can kill a company and that timing is everything for startups.
Premature scaling – the best way to kill a company « « The Equity KickerThe Equity Kicker
The power of today’s hardware is such that, for example, you can build a web application that supports thousands of users using one of the slowest available programming languages, brutally inefficient datastore access and storage patterns, zero caching, no sensible distribution of work, no attention to locality, etc. etc. Basically, you can apply every available anti-pattern and still come out the other end with a workable system, simply because the hardware can move faster than your bad decision-making. When it comes to truly scaling to Twitter or even Facebook size, however, those stop-gap solutions don’t really work any more, Payne says.
Speed and Scale Are Not the Same Thing
A talk for Eric Reis /Steve Blank’s UC Berkeley class on entrepreneurship. Given by Rashmi Sinha and Jonathan Boutelle (CEO and CTO of SlideShare).
It takes a village: Scaling your vision
4 types of scale - Venture Hacks
Product . Build product to do the work for you. Every single product in the world is a type of scale. Facebook has taken this to the extreme through automation .Taking the Mystery out of Scaling a Company
If you want to build an important company, then at some point you have to scale. People in startup land often talk about the magic of how few people built the original Google or the original Facebook, but today’s Google employs 20,000 people and today’s Facebook employs over 1,500 people. So, if you want to do something that matters, then you are going to have to learn the black art of scaling a human organization. These answers, while fine as far as they go have some important limitations.
Key Elements of a Massively Scalable Startup
VC backed startups generally aspire to valuations in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, but very few really consider all of the elements they’ll need to make it happen. After analyzing several startups I’ve worked with that have reached or are approaching these valuations I’ve boiled it down to four interdependent commonalities that always seem to exist. While they are easy to describe, they are of course very difficult to achieve.
The secret of scale, revenue and margin on a budget
This a guest post by David Hickson co-founder of stealth start-up tribesports.com . David’s a 12 year Internet-veteran and self professed geek-wannabe. He previously spent 5 years at lastminute.com , and was a founding shareholder and Head of Corporate Development at mydeco.com . I’m unlikely to give you an epiphany of Damascene proportions if I told you that the secret of scale on a budget is to activate the power of the people.
This blog post was also syndicated to Fast Company . The Scaling Startups panel I was on last week at Supernova generated a little coverage , but I wanted to go into a lot more detail than what I saw there, so it seems like a good time to jump back into blogging full-force. The panel abstract read : How can startups develop a distinctive culture, and sustain it as they grow?
Scaling startups
The Three Types Of Scalable Information Technology Companies
[click on image to enlarge] When I was in business school at Columbia I took a class taught by Bruce Greenwald . Bruce may be to strategy what Einstein was to Physics.
Modèle de croissance des startups : comment monter un business « scalable »
L’une des questions qui revient souvent dans les divers jurys auxquels je participe est celle de la « scalability », comprenez la capacité pour une jeune entreprise de grossir facilement, ou en tout cas avec des coûts maîtrisés, et d’ être capable de reproduire son modèle . Certains parleront même d’industrialisation. Question pertinente côté investisseurs, mais aussi pour les entrepreneurs : si tous les créateurs ne se lancent pas pour faire une « grosse » entreprise, la plupart y songent tout de même et pour certains c’est même l’une des seules façons de se faire plaisir à terme. Comment grandir, vite, bien, et de manière rentable ?How to Scale Without Losing Your Shirt
This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here . There comes a time for every venture when the owners have to decide whether hockey-stick-like growth is feasible or not. In your initial plan, you indicated a sudden surge in revenue at a certain point in time, i.e. where the hockey stick shows up.Startups die for not having customers, so STOP thinking about how to scale
If you think that scaling is one of the main issues you need to focus on while building your new disruptive web application…well think twice. It is quite sure you won’t have anything near to a mass adoption anytime soon. Instead you will have a quite slow user-curve acceptance and maybe some peak.High Scalability - High Scalability - Hot Scalability Links for Aug 6, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010 at 6:48AM Twitter Sees Its 20 Billionth Tweet writes Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb. Startups die for not having customers, so STOP thinking about how to scale . Alessandro Orsi says focusing on the architecture and scaling possibilities of your app for millions of users is just plain dumb...concentrate on marketing...concentrate on user experience . Alessandro is perfectly correct, but this isn't the year the 2000 when the default architecture that is easy is also not scalable and when sites were built from scratch one painful user at a time. Today neither is tue.April 3rd, 2012 Sean Murphy “We tell our disruptive teams to not do volume forecasts. Do not do a spreadsheet with volume forecasts on it, because it is unforecastable.