Ask HN: What would you do to 10x an existing business?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16956966

by patrics123 • 8 years ago

9 8 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Imagine you have an existing business at your hands. You have one or more products, some cash in the bank and a customer base of a few hundred B2B customers.

If you had 12 months to 10x the revenue / profit - what would you do? What steps would you try?

If you had 3 years, would you do something different?

segmondy• 8 years ago

Go get 20x the customers. Go and sell everyday.

tarr11• 8 years ago

It depends on what you are growing at right now. If you are doing 10x YOY, keep doing the same.

If you are doing 10% YOY then going to Vegas and betting it all on red would be a good choice.

viyu• 8 years ago

Sounds good. It's what the FedEx founder did with the remaining company money. They had only one week left of runaway, he gambled it and it seems to have worked http://for-starters.com/from-grade-c-to-the-skies-fedex-stor...

muzani• 8 years ago

Target about 5% week on week growth. If you have $1000 in sales this week, you'll want $1050 in sales next week, $1200 weekly sales in a month, , $12,600 weekly in a year.

This is actually a very conservative growth chart. Personally if I couldn't get 7% week on week growth, I'd worry about my business model.

If you can just hit this, you'll be fine.

If you don't, this is where all the startup frameworks kick in. You can set up a Business Model Canvas, look at whether your assumptions are correct. Attack either the low hanging fruit or the riskiest assumption. If you can fix the highest risk items, you can usually start generating good growth without any paid marketing.

Normally the problem is that the business hasn't hit product-market fit. Either the product isn't good enough, or it hasn't been able to expand or pitch itself into the market. When you hit product market fit, you'll be dealing with some crazy growth and struggle to keep up.

twunde• 8 years ago

Assuming it's a somewhat mature product, I'd suggest reading "It's not luck" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It's aimed at mature companies, but it has several ideas worth investigating such as segmenting the market

AznHisoka• 8 years ago

It depends on how serious this question is.

If you're dead serious, I'll allocate a certain % of the current revenue to buy puts/calls on a public company, and hope I'm right.

Why? Because if I knew a way to 10X the profit, I'd already done so.

charleyma• 8 years ago

answer would be it very much depends, some considerations that I would want to know:

- big difference between 10x revenue vs profit, what's the current cost basis / margin in the product? - evaluating current marketing efforts, how much demand is from inbound vs outbound, what's working and what's not - pricing, is the product being priced correctly - cost factors: support, infrastructure, salary, anything around cost of goods sold - what's the current revenue base? I would argue going from 100k MRR -> 1m MRR is a lot easier than going from 1m -> 10MM, that requires a lot more coordination and most likely enterprise customers - existing customer base, do I have success selling into some enterprise vs selling into longtail b2b segment

if I just had 1 year, I would be biased towards trying to focus on my core products and growing them, however if I don't have a large enough addressable market and I needed to 10x in 12 months, then I would focus much more on product development +R&D

if I had 3 years, I think the strategy would be similar, but with longer time spans to test different strategies

taprun• 8 years ago

I would look to improve the pricing strategy. You wouldn't believe how a few changes to a pricing page can improve a business' bottom line.

Ask HN: What would you do to 10x an existing business?

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