Premature Scaling and Killing Your Startup
Thursday, September 1st, 2011I was reading some random blog link I got on Twitter that had the great title of “Premature Scaling Kills Startups – The Startup Genome.” At first I thought it was going to be a post about the Human Genome. I guess my recent post about the Human Genome and EMR might have influenced that thought. Turns out, the post was talking about the “genomic data” of a startup company. Something I actually love more than the Human Genome.
You should go read the whole post, but his list of bullet points at the end hit me:
- The team size of startups that scale prematurely is 3 times bigger than the consistent startups at the same stage
- 74% of high growth Internet startups fail due to premature scaling
- Startups that scale properly grow about 20 times faster than startups that scale prematurely
- 93% of startups that scale prematurely never break the $100k revenue per month threshold
He also provided 2 summary items which help you get the most out of the bullet points above. I’d describe them simply as:
- Scale Consistently
- Constrain Your Scaling As Long As Possible
Great advice!