Why Doesn't a Thousand-customer Plan Work for Ten Customers?

On the show, scalability is kind of irrelevant in the beginning. The point is to get somebody and form a kernel of a user base. Expanding the kernel by ten percent is enough, because what reaches one stage is different from what reaches the next stage. One approach will not run from zero all the way to a hundred million dollars.

A completely different strategy has to take over every couple of months or every year. What fits a move from a hundred customers to a thousand does not fit a move from zero customers to ten, or from ten customers to a hundred. Every added zero, whether customers, revenue, or traffic, brings very different requirements for the next step and for what comes after getting there.

Zero to one and then one to N is the dream. On the show, the reality is that a move from one customer to a hundred might open a scalability problem that was not foreseen, a move from a hundred to a thousand is a different problem, and a move from a thousand to ten thousand is a different problem.