Scaling Your Startup Through Measurement and Repetition

“If you cannot measure, you cannot repeat. If you cannot repeat, you cannot scale.”

I love this quote. I believe the first time I heard it was from Seth Lieberman from Pangea Media. He may have created the statement. I have no idea. But, I do love it. And I feel like it is the simplest way I can relate to the idea of “scaling a business.” In order to scale a business, you must be able to repeat a process over and over again. Ideally, it is a process that has some sort of repeatable monetizable event on the sales side of the business, and some sort of repeatable viral loop on the user gen side of the business.

But how do you allow certain processes to repeat?!?! You must be able to make choices, spending your most valuable resources of time on things important to the business. Things that affect scale and growth. And in order to that, you must be able to set up hypotheses and test those hypotheses. You must decide what you’re going to measure, and focus on, and what not to.

If you cannot measure, you cannot repeat because you will not know what to continuously repeat to get to scale. And if you never repeat, you’ll never get the growth needed to scale beyond your initial hypotheses. If you cannot measure, you cannot repeat. If you cannot repeat, you cannot scale.