Ask HN: What would you do to 10x an existing business? Imagine you have an existing business at your hands. You have one or more products, some cash in the bank and a customer base of a few hundred B2B customers. If you had 12 months to 10x the revenue / profit - what would you do? What steps would you try? If you had 3 years, would you do something different? |
This is actually a very conservative growth chart. Personally if I couldn't get 7% week on week growth, I'd worry about my business model.
If you can just hit this, you'll be fine.
If you don't, this is where all the startup frameworks kick in. You can set up a Business Model Canvas, look at whether your assumptions are correct. Attack either the low hanging fruit or the riskiest assumption. If you can fix the highest risk items, you can usually start generating good growth without any paid marketing.
Normally the problem is that the business hasn't hit product-market fit. Either the product isn't good enough, or it hasn't been able to expand or pitch itself into the market. When you hit product market fit, you'll be dealing with some crazy growth and struggle to keep up.
- big difference between 10x revenue vs profit, what's the current cost basis / margin in the product? - evaluating current marketing efforts, how much demand is from inbound vs outbound, what's working and what's not - pricing, is the product being priced correctly - cost factors: support, infrastructure, salary, anything around cost of goods sold - what's the current revenue base? I would argue going from 100k MRR -> 1m MRR is a lot easier than going from 1m -> 10MM, that requires a lot more coordination and most likely enterprise customers - existing customer base, do I have success selling into some enterprise vs selling into longtail b2b segment
if I just had 1 year, I would be biased towards trying to focus on my core products and growing them, however if I don't have a large enough addressable market and I needed to 10x in 12 months, then I would focus much more on product development +R&D
if I had 3 years, I think the strategy would be similar, but with longer time spans to test different strategies
If you're dead serious, I'll allocate a certain % of the current revenue to buy puts/calls on a public company, and hope I'm right.
Why? Because if I knew a way to 10X the profit, I'd already done so.
If you are doing 10% YOY then going to Vegas and betting it all on red would be a good choice.