Does your business scale? Does your platform scale? Do you scale? What is scale?

Scaling Your Model

Whether a business model will scale is a question heard from investors and advertisers. They want to know if a business will generate returns on investment.

Their chief concerns are:

• Will it grow?
• Will it grow in revenue?
• Will revenue grow faster than expenses (Are there economies of scale)?

Scaling Your Product

Your application needs to continue working as it grows in usage. Maintaining a fast application with many concurrent users is essential.

This is a technological question rather than a business question:

• Do you have engineers with the proper expertise?
• Do you need to shard your databases?
• Load-balance?
• Are you properly cacheing?
• Should you replicate across multiple regions/data-centers?
• Does co-location make more sense than on-demand cloud hosting?

Scaling Your Development

Your code needs to scale with your employee count. When you have 1 or 2 people, you can afford to play fast and loose with your application. Decision on how to deploy code, use version control and fix bugs can be done on the fly, if made at all.

However, when you grow past 2 or 3, and especially when you have 10, 50 or hundreds of employees, your code base can become a nightmare.

Things like unit-testing, integration testing, coding standards and other defined processes need to be used and enforced to ensure the stability and quality of your product as it grows.