<story><title>Different ways to build a $100M business (2014)</title><url>http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build-100-million-business.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dalbasal</author><text>Re: the animal analogy... If you want to extend the sales-lingo, the term is &amp;quot;rats and mice&amp;quot; not mice and flies.&lt;p&gt;Jests aside, I like this kind of abstract strategic thinking process. It reminds me of the &amp;quot;1000 true fans&amp;quot; writeup from the last decade. &lt;i&gt;But&lt;/i&gt;, it&amp;#x27;s important to remember this is scaffolding for thinking strategically, not a blueprint. Often, the winning tactic is to  break such &amp;quot;rules.&amp;quot; But, thinking within a framework like this can focus the mind. It&amp;#x27;s useful to realize you&amp;#x27;re breaking a rule when trying to break it.&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;1,000 enterprise customers paying you $100k+ per year each&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of examples of sub-enterprise sized companies (even small businesses where everyone can still fit in a jumbo taxi) paying this much... for &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;A big example is advertising. Plenty of businesses spend 10% or more of their budget on advertising. How many software startups pay google&amp;#x2F;fb most of the money they raise from VCs? This applies to lots of businesses from SAAS apps to dental clinics. There are ad-management apps that charge 5% of ad spending. Services that charge 15%-20%.&lt;p&gt;Another example is &amp;quot;franchises.&amp;quot; Mcdonalds corporate&amp;#x27;s business model is to make $100k+ from small-medium businesses. It&amp;#x27;s not a very startup-ey example but an example nonetheless. The uber-of-x business model is kind of a reverse example of franchising. Uber charges the customer, and cuts the driver their share. If the customer were to pay drivers and the and the drivers paid uber... you have the mcdonalds model. It&amp;#x27;s debateable whether this counts as &amp;quot;selling to consumers&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;selling to businesses,&amp;quot; but there&amp;#x27;re specific examples in both camps.&lt;p&gt;So, it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;possible&lt;/i&gt; to sell 100k software to a $1m-$10m businesses... But it is very useful to realize that this &lt;i&gt;is rulebreaking&lt;/i&gt;. An enterpirse pays $100k+ for lots of things. A small business will only pay that much if it&amp;#x27;s absolutely core to their business model. Usually this means it&amp;#x27;s absolutely indispensible to gettng customers.</text></comment>
<story><title>Different ways to build a $100M business (2014)</title><url>http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build-100-million-business.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>omarchowdhury</author><text>Much more achievable would be to aim for revenues of $10M-20M, and a $100M exit value (5-10X multiple).</text></comment>