Capacity planning is a good exercise, but the brutal truth of the matter is that the most common scaling problem of startups is to have no scaling problems at a

Capacity planning is a good exercise, but the brutal truth of the matter is that the most common scaling problem of startups is to have no scaling problems at all. Especially with B2B startups. I could point to a client or two which had "We're having trouble holding on to the rocket ship" at some points along their growth curve. The far more common outcome, though, is to be rate limited on customer acquisition. If you ever are in the position where you have 120 people champing at the bit to buy your stuff but can only service 100, great, there exist easy solutions to that. The easiest is a variant on Raise Prices. For example, back in the day when Slicehost was rate-limited on the number of boxes Dell would let them put on their personal credit cards per month, and they had a substantial waiting list, they let people bid their way to the top of the waiting list by using non-refundable pre-pay for service. If you pre-paid for 6 months, you leapt ahead on the queue in front of those only willing to pre-pay for 3. This let them convert pre-paid cash into boxes, allowing them to onboard the entire wait list within 2 months of instituting the policy. It was genius.