Product scaling and Growth – A Quick Guide

If your business is not growing and you don’t know how to scale a product, it’s dying.

And that’s just science.

But how do you grow your business? Product scaling is the key to keeping the business growing. However, scaling the product requires great knowledge of MVP and other scaling methods like project management. 

So, what does it take to get your business to scale? And what if you’re already at the point where you need to start scaling? How do you do that?

That’s what we’ll be talking about today!

What is product scaling?

Product scaling means expanding the capabilities of your business by improving your team, products, services, business infrastructure, marketing strategies, and so on. 

Every business manages to survive and grows its revenue with the help of product scaling.  The scaling method requires multiple strategies for different business areas, such as: 

• Marketing 
• Project management
• Product development 
• Team management
• Product testing
• Business infrastructure, etc.

However, there are many reasons to perform product scaling for your business growth.

Why do you need to scale your product?

Product scaling becomes necessary to make your business profitable in the long run. Product scaling will help your businesses grow revenue and expand their reach among new customers.

Moreover, product scaling helps beat your business’ competitors and provides a great way to launch new innovative products and acquire new customers in the market. 

You can check startup stats and facts to know why product scaling is essential: 

• 70% of startups fail due to premature scaling.
• Scaling helped successful companies grow their user bases by up to 360 percent!
• A study found that scaling-successful firms typically raise up to 250 percent more money than they had projected.
• 42% of new product ideas fail due to a long development time.

There are many ways to scale your product and grow your business. Knowing all these product scaling types will help you to create the right product scaling strategy. 

Types of product scaling

There are four ways by which you can scale your product:

1. Bootstrapping

The scaling focuses on organic growth through the internal means of the company, depending on the products, marketing, and product scalability.

The benefits of bootstrapping are as follows:

I. Easy to access

Bootstrapping is an easy and accessible product scaling method for new business owners. The scaling focuses on growing the business organically.

II. Customer-centric

In bootstrapping, more priority is given to the customer segment than external funding for business revenue. The customer-centric approach makes companies focus on their business, helping them to provide a better customer experience and grow their business.  

III.  Less external pressure

There is less external pressure on business owners as there is no involvement of investors and banks for funding. Less pressure on business owners provides them greater freedom to make independent decisions for their business growth. 

2. Slow scaling

Slow scaling is similar to bootstrapping, which includes some of its benefits. However, the critical difference is that businesses prefer dependency on external funds such as bank loans and venture capital, but it is low.

The benefits of slow scaling are as follows:

I. Time availability

The companies that prefer slow scaling get more time to focus on their business efficiency. Moreover, the slow scaling will help you ensure that you create the right thing before scaling your business too far.

II. Flexibility in funding

Along with taking funding from your business operations, slow scaling allows you to take funds from external sources. Taking funds from both sides perfectly balances different funding sources for business scaling. 

III. Smart decision making

Compared to bootstrapping, slow scaling helps entrepreneurs to allow having more time to make better business decisions. The company can use its funds strategically to take the business in the right direction.

3. Fast scaling

Fast scaling is challenging for almost every business. It requires a viral product to increase its customer base in less time with limited funds.

The benefits of fast scaling are as follows:

I. Improving entrepreneurship

Fast scaling has many challenges and difficulties, helping business owners learn entrepreneurship. Learning about different business skills is great for business owners to scale their products in an ideal way.

II. Competitive advantage

Scaling your product fast helps you to defend your business against many competitors in the market. Moreover, not scaling your business fast can limit your company’s potential.

III. Economies of scale

Fast scaling allows you to increase your margins and scale your business further. This situation results in Economics of scale. The Economics of scale is a concept in which you increase the overall production, reducing the cost per unit. 

4. Blitzscaling

The process involves multiple techniques that help organizations to expand massively in a short time. The Blitzscaling is also based on Mark Zuckerberg’s quote, “move fast and break things.” 

The benefits of Blitzscaling are as follows:

I. Fastest growth

Blitzscaling fulfills the ultimate aim of business which is the fastest business growth. With this method, the companies experience massive growth in business over a short time.

II. Larger impact

Many companies have significantly impacted the market with the help of blitzscaling. For example, Amazon blitzscaled its e-Commerce business when the internet was new but quickly expanded on a large scale.

How to scale your product?

Here are the different ways of product scaling in detail:

1. Use customer feedback

You can perform multiple research and analysis for taking customer reviews on your current product. Based on customer feedback, you can figure out positive and negative points of your product and improve them by adding new valuable features and removing drawbacks.

At the time of new product development, you can collect data from your customers about how they interact with your product to determine a list of features that can be improved, added, or removed.

2. Make your product capable of scale

Try to make that product scalable and capable of taking new features at regular intervals so you can provide a fresh product experience to your customer. Enabling your project for continuous integration will help to make it scalable and get better results in your business.

3. Analyze & test your product

To ensure your customer will not face any trouble while using your new products, you must perform multiple testing of the products, including:

• Quality control: Businesses use multiple techniques and testing to ensure their product qualities are well-maintained.

• Quality assurance: A systematic approach to determine whether the products meet the needs and expectations of customers or not.   

• MVP testing: Testing business ideas to predict their success before the launch. The MVP tests short-term goals by working on customer opinions and product building.  

4. Make a perfect marketing strategy

The right marketing strategy is essential to scaling your product’s reach in the market. Launching your MVP product is necessary to know how customers will react to the basic version of your product. Tracking customer engagement with your product can help you to improve products based on traffic, social interactions, customer comments, abandoned carts, conversions, and so on.

Knowing the customer journey will help you know when customers are more likely to buy or reject your product. Both successful and failed conversions will help you improve your marketing strategy accordingly for better results and profits in your business.

But how can you decide it is a perfect time to scale your product?  Let’s check. 

When should you scale your product?

Knowing the right time for product scaling is necessary, so you don’t miss the perfect opportunity of business growth and beat your competitor. 

You should scale your product when you are facing the following challenges in your business:

1. Unstable growth in business revenue 

Experiencing a shortage in business revenue due to fewer customers, signals scale your product.  You can overcome the challenge by putting extra effort into marketing strategies like SEO and content marketing to get a more customer base and improve your business.

To increase business profits, you can minimize the commission price (based on referrals/affiliates) or work on a pricing strategy for setting a reasonable product cost by adding new features or making a few modifications to your product.

2. Negative customers feedback

Negative customer feedback on multiple online platforms is a red flag for your business. This means you need to scale your business based on the reviews of your users. Taking customer reviews will help you identify problems related to product shipping, customer service, quality, and so on. 

Scaling here is trying to fix all these problems customers face while purchasing your product. Thus, this will help you create a better brand image among your customers. 

3. Wastage of time and efforts on repetitive tasks

Do you and your team waste time and effort on unnecessary repetitive tasks? This is where you can perform scaling using automation. Automation can help reserve efforts and funds, bringing better productivity and cost-cutting to your business. Moreover, automation can help you to focus on other essential parts of your business.

You can use various automation tools to perform different operations, such as email scheduling, chatbots for answering basic and repetitive questions, etc.

4. Team lacking the capability to work on new projects

Proper team management is necessary to bring and maintain productivity in your business. To resolve work overload on your staff for new projects, you can consider hiring part-time members to your team until the completion of temporary revenue-generating projects.   

5. Not having a detailed plan for business growth

Having a broad vision for your business is important to keep it running in the long run. You must create your business plan if you haven’t made it yet. You can do an internal staff meeting to discuss new strategies for product scaling, such as adding new product lines, manufacturing items on a larger scale, working on new marketing strategies, etc.  

Planning to scale your products?

Choosing a suitable business partner for scaling your product can help in many ways. Partnering with an external team can help you to figure out all the drawbacks and areas of improvement within your business.

A company experienced in product scaling like Idea Usher can help you quickly figure out areas of improvement to grow your business.

Contact Idea Usher to let our team discuss your business challenges and find perfect solutions that will bring good results in the long run.

Contact us:

Email:

[email protected]

Phone:

(+1)732 962 4560

(+91)859 140 7140

FAQ

1. How do you make a product scalable?

You can scale your products (software) by following these steps:

• Choose the right tech stack for making product
• Go for microservices architecture instead monolithic architecture
• Choose cloud infrastructure over a single local server
• Make your product able to deploy new features quickly

2. What does it mean to scale a project?

The project scaling involves adding new features and overcoming projects’ limitations to provide users a better product/service experience.  Instead of introducing new products, many companies choose to improve their current product by project scaling.

3. When should you scale a product?

You can scale your product if you see any performance drop in your products, market overtaken by your competitors, or a decline in your business revenue. Scaling can make your business more profitable and stable in the long run.    

4. What is the most scalable business?

These are some of the most scalable businesses that you can start:

• Software development
• Blogs
• Digital courses
• Offering subscription-based services
• Investing
• Rental Properties