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[To be able to scale] your web app business must also: 1. Not require additional staff time per customer Well, I guess that means immensely succesful enterpr
by Confusion 17y ago
[To be able to scale] your web app business must also:
1. Not require additional staff time per customer
Well, I guess that means immensely succesful enterprises like Facebook and Twitter don't scale.
After all, they've been hiring more and more people while growing, in part to deal with all their customers.
- Huppie 17y agoIt's there, in the end: Final caveat: I’ve written this post discussing this concept in absolutes i.e. you either do or do not pass the sleep test. Of course in reality there is not a single web app business that does not need to employ more staff as their revenue and customer base grows. Google is a fine example of a business that is designed to avoid having to employ more people as revenue or customers grow and they employ over 20,000 people today. But this test is a useful way to measure and think about how efficiently your business will scale.
- nkohari 17y agoI think it has more to do with whether the staff time and customer count are linear. Obviously each additional customer adds overhead, but in scalable businesses, growth of revenue far outpaces the growth of overhead.
- blasdel 17y agoFacebook has 1 million active users per technical employee.
- nfnaaron 17y agoFacebook and Twitter don't scale in the same way that adding servers doesn't scale because part of the additional processing power is consumed by networking and other infrastructure. (Is that a litote?)