Actually, no. Scaling – rapidly growing a business, product or user base – is rarely easy. Often, scaling problems are accompanied by the phrases “Victims of their own success” or “that’s a nice problem to have” — try telling the poor souls running around trying to solve it with everyone screaming at them to FIX IT NOW how “nice” this problem is, and see how far you get.
You see, scaling problems – organizational, technical, financial – tend to hit hard, hit fast and, increasingly, publicly. Social media amplifies the pain. It’s really tough to work around a scaling issue that’s brought your system to its knees when you’re staring into the dark depths of that tidal wave with your back against the wall and feeling that the eyes of the world are upon you. That’s a lonely place to find yourself.
Unfortunately, in a world of finite time, money and people, while it’s possible to know that you might have issues here, here and here, it’s often hard to know which you’re going to have to deal with first. Meanwhile, your competitors aren’t standing still and the marketplace does what it wants to. The curse of the installed base, if you will, makes it increasingly difficult to devote the resources you want to innovation when you’re spending an more and more of your energies satisfying your existing clients and maintaining your current solution.
None of this is particularly new, and I’ve written before about the customer service scaling problem I created here at FeedBlitz and finally getting to grips with it earlier this year.
Two weeks ago, though, I had one of those long dark tea-time of the soul moments reserved for CEOs and founders a panic attack about how FeedBlitz will cope as and when Google makes FeedBurner’s demise real. Were we really ready? How could we possibly know when and how people will switch en masse? How can we make the product more scalable, more resilient? The people we’ve brought on board — how do we continue to make them happy, not only during times of complete stress, but also during times of relative calm? And how do we do all this work before a crisis, without infinite wells of time or money to dip into?
After all, there’s no point building a perfectly scalable product and organization that can handle X million concurrent users only to find your marketing isn’t up to snuff, your actual user base is a rounding error on your scaling spreadsheet, and all of a sudden you have a very expensive, superbly engineered, completely capable, thoroughly robust solution — and an utterly failed business.
The answer, of course, is to design the technology and build your organization so that you can scale quickly; but only when needed. Your contingency plans need to be ready, and calmly executed when necessary.
The sneaky thing about scaling, however, is that building scale to solve one problem often can throw others into sudden, stark relief. Made the database 10x faster? Terrific! But uh oh – now you’ve run out of bandwidth to connect to it, and the application is running so much faster now that you have no CPU left on your servers. You can scale out by adding more machines? Great – but how do you manage 50 machines when last week you only had 10 and were doing it all by hand? You can bring in more help to handle increased call volume? How do you train them, and how are they effective quickly without making costly customer service errors, or taking so much from your experienced people that your ability to service your clients goes visibly and permanently backwards?
You’re still DOA, just differently.
So. Behind the scenes, FeedBlitz is not only different orgnizationally from where it was two months ago, it’s also going through the changes needed technically, behind the scenes, to enable us to be more reactive when we need to be. That’s a good thing. But I’m mindful of the military aphorism that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. So will it be enough? Frankly, I don’t know. Can we react to changes fast enough? I don’t know that, either. We think so, but only time will tell.
But are we going to make it work, for you and your subscribers? Hell, yeah.
Meanwhile, though, save the date! Please join me for a free webcast this Wednesday, July 17th, at noon eastern, on switching from FeedBurner to FeedBlitz, with a demo and live Q&A. Space is limited and filling up quickly, so reserve your slot now.
P.S. Next week – more on how I’m going to enable FeedBlitz to keep our people happy.
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