Conversation

What do you call a startup that never grows up? A Peter Pan startup? A lifestyle business is one kind of Peter Pan startup?
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Seems to me a lifestyle business is different from an ordinary small business in a specific way: unlike a small business it innovates, but unlike a tech startup it deliberately ensures it innovates in a subcritical way, so it is not forced to grow/scale by a network effect.
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A true small business like a bakery is naturally self-regulating in size. Unless you do something dumb like offering a bad Groupon, the length of the queue out the door will limit the demand. It’s connecting to the internet that creates potential for possibly unwanted growth.
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For say a downloadable software product (not SaaS) if you get way more users than you can profitably serve due to human-in-loop bottleneck, releasing a defeatured open-source version with explicitly downgraded SLAs is almost a steam pressure release valve.
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