Today I had a coffee with a young startupper here in Dubai.

He is in the process of launching his real estate business,
and was happy to share some ideas about how to get traction and scale.

If you go on line and search for "how to scale your business idea",
you are going to find dozens of websites offering their recipe.

From the "5 critical steps for scaling your business" to
"how to scale a business in 7 steps"...
there are plenty of great ideas.

There are lists that put their attention on focusing,
other on building a team, other on assuring great communication,
be customer centric... and many more recommendations
about "what to do".

But none of the lists tells you "why to do" their steps...

The problem is that their "steps" are not "steps".
Are just a nice list of activities without a pourpose.

When you plan to scale,
your goal is not to put a pebble on top of another pebble,
and hope that magically the pebbles multiplies like bread and fishes...

1. Is there a Problem?
   Is there a Customer that has a problem you can solve? Just "a" customer. Start by talking with 1 or 2 possible customers, just to check if they have the problem and it's for them a pressing one.
2. Is there a Solution?
   If there is a problem, you then can come with a possible solution. Your goal is to verify that the approach to the solution is acceptable by that customer,
3. Is there a Standard Solution?
   Then you want to know if there is a solution, made up of the minimum number of stable and consistent features, that it is liked by the most part of the customers' sample population.
4. Is there a Real Market?
   Finally you want to know if this standard solution can be rolled out to cover the full market population.

Note how the number of Customers involved into the tests, grows at each step. Your investment into each test should be proportional to the degree of confidence reached.

If you want to scale your business idea,
build a scaling test that aims to answer these questions.

Then you could take advantage of all the recommendations
around team, communication, investments, competition etc.
to help you execute your scaling test.

Scaling is a test, not a program.

Hope this helps,

Flavio