The Scale Fallacy (And The Value Of Steady Success) -- Jonathan Sieg
The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Siegel's new book, The San Francisco Fallacy.
"There's no value in services, because they don't scale."
Startup culture says that success must be scalable: growth should be "exponential"; distribution should be "viral." This makes services the poor cousin in the startup world.
Services businesses don't tell the story of spectacular success that VCs and the media want. By definition, they are limited in scale to the number of personnel. Services are not a quick way to fame, glory, and riches.
But services can be a crucial facilitator of startup success. They can be the bedrock on which a founder's career is built. And, though they may never make you a billionaire, they can bring great rewards nonetheless: they can bring you into creative, corporate, and social spaces to which you'd never otherwise have had access.
The Scale Fallacy convinces would-be founders to focus on digital products that scale. But focusing on the services they could sell would make many of them more successful more quickly, and that might give them a platform on which to later build a scalable startup.
Continue Reading on appcues
"There's no value in services, because they don't scale."
Startup culture says that success must be scalable: growth should be "exponential"; distribution should be "viral." This makes services the poor cousin in the startup world.
Services businesses don't tell the story of spectacular success that VCs and the media want. By definition, they are limited in scale to the number of personnel. Services are not a quick way to fame, glory, and riches.
But services can be a crucial facilitator of startup success. They can be the bedrock on which a founder's career is built. And, though they may never make you a billionaire, they can bring great rewards nonetheless: they can bring you into creative, corporate, and social spaces to which you'd never otherwise have had access.
The Scale Fallacy convinces would-be founders to focus on digital products that scale. But focusing on the services they could sell would make many of them more successful more quickly, and that might give them a platform on which to later build a scalable startup.
Continue Reading on appcues
