> You're planning to scale to 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000 users eventually? OK. Well, what's your service? Are you planning the next Facebook where everybody can talk to anybody? Then you have some challenges you better start figuring out.
Thinking this way actually leads to one of the most common failure modes. Specifically the day-dreamer death where the principals become so enamored with a fantasy of what the end-state could look like that they lose focus on the next step to improve their odds of success. This is under-reported because day-dreamers are so common that when they try a startup and fail, it's not really an interesting pattern to report on. Such founders will tend to cite specific reasons that sound better in context (eg. wrong market, product flaws, sales funnel flaws, etc). But as someone who's been in the web startup space 25 years, I've seen it over and over again where founders fail to fully engage with the hard problems right in front of them in favor of working on what's fun, easy or tied to some dopamine hit of imagined future success.
In practice, you should not spend one second thinking about the requirements of 1B users until you have at least 10M. You will need to completely rewrite everything multiple times along the way to that scale anyway, and more importantly, you won't know the product requirements to actually get there until you achieve the earlier milestones and get the necessary user feedback about what's working at each size of user base.
There's a misunderstanding. I may have miscommunicated.
I'm advocating for understanding your business, not for prematurely building things.
If you're in the extremely rare class of businesses trying to build something on the scale of FB or YouTube where that sort of massive scaling is intrinsic to your mission then yes, you need to start thinking about those problems early.
For everybody else, yeah, absolutely focus on product and getting to 100 or 1000 or 100K or whatever users first.
Precisely. It'd be like trying to make an F22 fighter jet right off the bat when you're still in the era of biplanes.
I think people often underestimate the strata of learning, and the essential feedback that gets you to the next level. Or at least that's how it works for mere mortals like myself :)
I'm advocating for thinking about if you'll need an F22 fighter jet someday.
If the answer truly is "yes", that's something you'll need to figure out early or at least plan for.
For the other 99.99% of situations where the answer is "no" or "almost certainly not" then absolutely, you should not be wasting time building an F22 or even thinking about it.
Thinking this way actually leads to one of the most common failure modes. Specifically the day-dreamer death where the principals become so enamored with a fantasy of what the end-state could look like that they lose focus on the next step to improve their odds of success. This is under-reported because day-dreamers are so common that when they try a startup and fail, it's not really an interesting pattern to report on. Such founders will tend to cite specific reasons that sound better in context (eg. wrong market, product flaws, sales funnel flaws, etc). But as someone who's been in the web startup space 25 years, I've seen it over and over again where founders fail to fully engage with the hard problems right in front of them in favor of working on what's fun, easy or tied to some dopamine hit of imagined future success.
In practice, you should not spend one second thinking about the requirements of 1B users until you have at least 10M. You will need to completely rewrite everything multiple times along the way to that scale anyway, and more importantly, you won't know the product requirements to actually get there until you achieve the earlier milestones and get the necessary user feedback about what's working at each size of user base.