Scale!
The hidden secrets on how to scale your startup faster, and the absurdity of it all.
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Faster, faster!
You are young, talented, and inspired. You dropped out of college to chase your dreams, because they said the time is now or never. Your high school best buddy Daniel started his business two years ago. Everyone else is doing it.
Gotta get there before the door closes. Your early retirement is waiting. Gotta cash that cheque and contribute to the startup ecosystem and shit, like all your startup heroes do. You convinced your next best buddy Trevor to work with you, together, in his basement, because his basement is slightly better than your basement.
You always had brilliant ideas, but this one is a real gem. It’s like Tinder, for cats, and you did all the market validation already.
You used Google Keyword tool to do market research. Looks like the keywords are generating massive interest. Who knew? People will do anything with their cats on the Internet. Anyway the market is definitely not saturated, yet. There are some potential competitors, so you need to go faster. Grab that market share.
You created a landing page with some basic info of your idea with email address collection. You posted it on a couple of forums and some cat related subreddits. You get some traffic, and you got shadow banned on that one subreddit, because Reddit recognises shit content, sometimes. You collected some email addresses and some natural traffic. It’s tiny, but it’s a start.
You built your first prototype in two weeks. It’s shit. You called it a minimum viable product. It’s totally not viable. You put it out there anyway, because you are the man. I mean, a man. A man with no shame. I mean, a man with a dream. Gotta do it faster than others.
You learned all of this from your friend Daniel and his business partner Wilson. Gotta have that insider connection. Wilson. What a stupid name. Don’t trust anyone with a last name as their first name. Somebody said, the fastest way is the longest way. Some other body said, no, just go fast; get it out there, get feedback, and iterate.
You’ve setup Google analytics and laid out your growth funnel. It looks something like this:
- Get traffic
- Signup
- User enters cat info
- Match cats, do some cat magic stuff and show to the user
- Make it funny so that the user wants to share. Viral!
- Monetise with subscription option for unlimited right swipe on other cats, as well as some digital cat goods because meow
You built a very rough internal tracking page where you can monitor the user flow through the funnel, identified drop off points, kept iterating, filled in spots by reaching out to the users with surveys, emails, and some skype calls.
You decided to use the latest free tech tools to coordinate better with Trevor. For now, you use Slack for chat, Trello for task managment, and Google Drive for documentations. Your tech stack is AWS, Ruby on Rails, and some mobile thing. You and Trevor are learning so much so quickly as you go. Every lesson is on Youtube, and every question you had is answered on StackOverflow. What a time to live.
Months passed, and you show that hockey stick curve, and you are getting there, although not as ideal as your initial plot. User growth is steady, and your first $25 came in. Fuck yeah. This is your chance, Daniel said. He introduced you to Lionel, a dude from an investment group.
Lionel’s group is interested in investing in your company to scale it up. You can’t believe it. This is happening so fast, but you must go faster! You did all the right things. You researched the basics of investment structures and valuation. You couldn’t believe Lionel’s love for your vision in cat things. The truth was Lionel’s love was not with cats, but with hockey; hockey sticks to be exact.
You got funded. Now you are a proper company with growing paying users. Your users are scaling, and your team is scaling. You wrote down the process of what you did, your vision, and delegated instead of micromanaging. Meanwhile, you keep iterating the product, engaging with your users, building trust.
You were most eloquent. informative, and convincing that your great idea is actually great, and were transparent so that if it isn’t, you could get some real feedback and refine. You knew bad feedback is the best thing you can get after temporarily being stuck in a loop of silence.
You did everything right, and you are growing fast. All vloggers are now talking about your app, you got featured on Product Hunt, and you are creating technological disruption in the cat world. The society of cats will reward you with money, and paws; and… pause.
Slow down… before it gets out of hand, and don’t scale.
Slowing down
There are countless books on how to grow your business and succeed. Lots of aphorisms, formulae, and industry standard measures. When these rules are bent or broken, the business risks falling behind. It’s almost as if the whole industry fueled by people dreading 9 to 5 jobs and big corporations stopped thinking outside the box, and are grinding inside a system that in itself resembles a big corporation.
Of course, there is a lot of generalisation going on here. I am doing it, but I hate reductionism. There are some amazing talents out there doing wonderful things to create value to our society. New generation of talented kids with good intentions, or some starting off just wanting to become rich, and along the way facing existential questions and finding purpose.
Sometimes, slowing down might be a better option. Questions should be asked; are we solving problems that are inherent to humanity; are the values created by the business actually making societal contributions; or are we trying to blindly meet the market demands?
The tech industry itself as a collective consciousness is realising this. Now everyone wants to slow down a bit. They want to take a break from this non stop running, and to live life. So now it seems, how to slow down became a rising market. Everyone wants to slow down now. They want to slow down, quicker.
The technological ruling class
Capitalism and free market is showing its maximum potential with tech industry, where there is a chance for a common man to rise and gain wealth and power through value creation. We have a new breed of people that can be classified as technological ruling class; super rich with incredible power to disrupt and shape the society and our ecology.
The social impacts and disruption is something we must think about really carefully. There lies a discord between what people need vs. what people want. It is natural for fun and easy products that has social elements to go viral and generate that traction, compared to things that may actually take the consumers to take a step back, think, and really make the lives better.
The world is being shaped by vanities of Facebooks and Instagrams more than smaller virtuous businesses that could be focused on… say, being green or being more humane (I can’t even give examples here, because I, myself, am a very victim of my vanity and social media).
These people of the technological ruling class got there by running their business brilliantly with combination of talent and luck. It must be noted however, that they have been appointed to their powers through the market forces rather than democratic means. The amount of political and social influence they have is by nature quite extreme.
Zuckerberg can literally shape the way a lot of people see this world, self driving cars will gradually classify all drivers as unskilled workers, and so on. The societal consequences of their businesses are enormous; sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and often unpredictable; and the motives will always be aligned with business gains first, for no fault of their own. After all, that is how they got there.
I think good ol’ Bill and Elon are doing ok, but the news these days are filled with so many horror stories with Uber. I am not sure what’s going on with Mark. I will go into more details on the social impacts on a future post.
It is with caution we must proceed. Are you ready for the responsibility?
On the other hand, here are some serious forecasts…
Behold thy future looks liketh below:
- The startup ecosystem will continue to grow, and it will reshape itself constantly.
- There will be rise in the fields of decentralisation, hybrid decentralisation, and decentralised manufacturing.
- Information revolution will take place in many different forms, on information consumption and analysis.
- There will be more of environmental, humanities, and medical clusters.
- Artificial intelligence and automation will continue to grow.
- Lots of bad things and good things will happen. [citations needed]
Our future will look very different, and it will be a lot more decentralised, due to the policies. Everything goes through phases. Like how the rise of Amazon killed all brick and mortar bookshops and then again now small artisan bookshops are thriving. Market shares will be distributed more evenly, and with all the automation we will have to reevaluate the very definition of work very soon.
The real hidden secrets on how to scale your startup
So the real secret is; be ready for the responsibility, have a purpose, and have a vision of shaping the future. Create the world you want to live in with your product, instead of living it with the money you made with a product that you don’t care. Now might be your last chance to scale, because the whole landscape is changing again very soon.
Don’t listen to me though. I am a nobody, who is grinding through the startup life in the information consumption field, making wild predictions, concerned more about our ecology and our society than my business. My predictions are always wrong. Scale faster, maybe? :)
P.S. The italicised parts on the first segment of this article are actual tips.
P.S.2. I came up with Tinder+cats idea on the fly while writing this, but I think it actually is a great idea. You could signup, upload your cat pictures and profile of breed, age, etc. Swipe left/right on other cats. On a successful match you get fun cat facts based on the combined breed info and you can send messages to the other cat.
