Do Things That Scale: Starting a Business That Will Take Off

Summary: There are only so many hours in a day so you need to build a business that can grow while you’re sleeping, on vacation, or working on your next business. You have to do things that scale when starting a business that will take off.<br> While we are discussing scaling a business, there are plenty of other areas of life that you can scale including investing and video games.<br> What is Scale?<br> To scale a business means to create a system, product, or service that can generate more money through some resource that isn’t your time. <br> Scale is typically used in computer science. We have a website that can support 100 people. How can we scale it to support 100,000 people?<br> Scale is a concept that is meant to support infinite growth. When starting a business, you want to find ways to apply your time and money that are scalable and to shift your focus from things with a hard maximum return to things that have the potential to be infinitely scalable.<br> Scale is Sexy<br> Sexy sells and is why <a href="https://www.listenmoneymatters.com/amazon-student-prime/">Amazon</a> is such a sexy business. When Amazon recently announced that the cost of <a href="https://www.listenmoneymatters.com/go/amazon-prime/">Prime</a> would go from $99 a year to $119 a year, they scaled their revenue without doing any additional work or spending any additional money.<br> Amazon Prime is not a physical good, it can be sold over and over, and the price can continue to increase. Those price increases create revenue out of thin air.<br> Things That Scale<br> If you’re looking for a business idea, these are examples of a things that scales.<br> Digital Creations<br> Microsoft coded the first version of Windows once and have since sold it hundreds of millions of time. Windows 7 has sold <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2011/09/13/microsoft-sold-450-million-copies-of-windows-7/">450 million</a> copies.<br> Subscriptions<br> How many of us pay for a monthly gym membership we don’t use? Or a domain name that is dormant. Do you subscribe to magazines you don’t read? When you have a business based on subscriptions, retention is more important than acquisition. You’ve switched the customer’s resistance from purchase to cancelation.<br> This is why<a href="https://www.listenmoneymatters.com/go/trim/"> Trim</a> is such a great model; it’s a business that scales because there is no end to the number of people who have subscriptions they don’t use. Why don’t they cancel them? Because it’s a pain in the ass to do so. Trim does it for you.<br> Podcasts, Blogs, YouTube Channels<br> Each episode of LMM has a fixed cost to create. It’s Andrew, Thomas, Laura, and my time. But once we publish each episode, everything after is profit. Sometimes an episode makes a lot of money, and sometimes it languishes out there.<br> Gangnam Style has been viewed more than 3.1 billion times. From Youtube views alone, it has made <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/gangnam-style-youtube_n_2533620.html">$870,000 and more than $8 million in total. </a><br> Things That Can Be Automated<br> Things that can be automated are things that scale. The average profit margin for a dry-cleaning business is <a href="https://brandongaille.com/the-dry-cleaning-business-model-explained/">150%</a>! It’s not unheard of for the business to make a $1 profit on every article they clean. Why so high? Because almost all of the dry cleaning process is automated and it’s a service that there is always a need for.<br> Car washes are another excellent example. The employees don’t even touch your car; the whole thing is automated. The only expenses after set up apart from low paid employees are water and soap, both of which are cheap.  (As an aside, I have never driven and lived in NYC for 15 years where no one else did either.