Editor’s Note: In the new podcast Masters of Scale, LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman explores his philosophy on how to scale a business — and at Entrepreneur.com, entrepreneurs are responding with their own ideas and experiences in our hub. This week, we’re discussing Hoffman’s theory: the only way to scale is to do things that don’t scale.
In the first episode of Masters of Scale, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky says, “There’s really two stages of a startup’s product. The first is design a perfect experience and then you scale that experience.”
While it’s good to think of your product in terms of the experience, designing a product or service does not necessarily fit nicely into those two stages due to the complexity and factors that are involved.
Get your product out there.
When I first designed my platform for Due, I knew all along that I was not going to wait to create the perfect product before I launched it. We just made sure we had the basic technology in place that was proven to offer a solution for online invoicing that moved businesses from paper to digital billing processes.
That’s because I knew I had the basis for something that would immediately help my target audience of small business owners, freelancers and startup founders that were in need of a convenient online invoicing process that would improve their cash flow and get them paid on time.
Instead, my approach was about delivering a scalable product that we could tweak over time as we determined what else would help our target audience.
Follow the learning curve toward a perfect product.
Did it work? Yes, it was the best approach for the product we were offering, and it taught us a lot about what our audience needed. By giving them a starting point to change their cash flow, they could then tell us what else would help them. That provided a way for us to then add those features and continue to attract…