What Sheer Numbers Mean for Scaling

How many Americans even know about this day? Or its origin? Or the various derivate names or meanings? It really doesn't matter what it is, but the fact that it outsells Cyber Monday in a matter of minutes does.

The really simple fact is if you can sell one of anything in China, you will sell four times as many units of goods as you would in the US. A billion of anything is a lot of anything. If it's good enough to sell in China, in really doesn't have to be great, just good enough to sell to the broadest markets there.

By no means am I advocating for mediocre quality. I'm just working with statistical reality here. If you want your world's greatest soap product to go from selling to all your neighbors and friends to selling in the millions, perhaps billions, at the same time, China is the place to go. Think of it this way: if you want the most water, do you go to the Pacific Ocean or the Baltic Sea? Truly, if you can sell your products in China, or at least India - which is the only nation on the earth approaching China's population base, you should do it.

Now that the extraordinary point of population demographics has your attention, here's the rest of the story for scaling. It really isn't all about the number of consumers you can sell to. Ultimately, what its about is the volume of currency that you can attract. For that, the reality is the US is still the best place to scale any idea that isn't driven entirely by consumer demographics. On any exchange rate basis, we have more to spend than anyone else.

So if you're going after anything that involves multiplying capital, insurance funding, or other financial products, your best market is right here on domestic soil. Then again population demographics and financial capital are no longer the only "big number" factors involved in scaling strategy either. The marriage of humans to technology devices means the IT factor, with everything from individual bits of targeted data to the absolute number of devices eligible to use an application, are vital scaling metrics for any product or service,

While other factors can exceed these in the scaling of your own particular product or service, when you set out to understand the mission of scaling, and the opportunities it brings, remember the old saying "the sky is in the limit", but revise it just a little. Today the solar system is the limit, tomorrow perhaps the universe. Big thinking, and big numbers, matter.