31–35 of 35 posts
Can a business ever just reach a natural size and say to themselves, "this is as large as we're going to get, we're profitable, having a good time, and everyone is happy." I realize they have funding and thus a responsibility to maximize their investments, but I'd love to build a company that feels like it has a natural size.
Can a business ever just reach a natural size and say to themselves, "this is as large as we're going to get, we're profitable, having a good time, and everyone is happy." I realize they have funding and thus a responsibility to maximize their investments, but I'd love to build a company that feels like it has a natural size.
There are lots of business that do exactly that. Give Small Giants a read, it's really quite interesting. http://www.smallgiantsbook.com/
Can a business ever just reach a natural size and say to themselves, "this is as large as we're going to get, we're profitable, having a good time, and everyone is happy." I realize they have funding and thus a responsibility to maximize their investments, but I'd love to build a company that feels like it has a natural size.
There's a fantastic hamburger place down the street from my house. They make a fixed number of patties every day and when they run out, they close for the day. The owners are constantly asked why they don't buy more patties or expand to more locations around town. They've repeatedly stated that they're doing just fine with where they are and have no desire to push things further. There's a certain beauty here that's…
Unless, of course, you start to earn a bad reputation for slow support times or bad customer service because your product is so popular, but I guess that is a good problem to have.
Thanks for sharing.
Wait, what? Why the hell would anyone WANT Etsy to scale? Their brand is synonymous with the worst sort of tasteless kitsch known to man. What really needs to happen is someone needs to reboot the concept but include istockphoto.com's vetting process for potential vendors.
One man's treasure is another man's knitted kitten bowtie. It's difficult to do a "curated" etsy when their core offering is basically "things not mainstream enough to be mass produced."
I learned last week that one of the founders of Etsy is Jared Tarbell, the excellent computational artist ( http://complexification.net/gallery/ , http://www.levitated.net/ ). He wasn't mentioned in the article though, I wonder why.