Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by iagomr 4567 days ago
I guess someone has to bring it up, but a digital design school is not a startup.
1 comments

Care to explain why this is not a startup?
Because it's not scalable (yet).

For their startup to increase revenue to 100x or make $7M in revenue, their efforts/time put in/costs would need to be 50x-100x higher. For it to be a startup, at this scale their efforts should only be 2x-3x higher.

In other words, if they can't get to $10M in rev with 20 people or less, it's just not scalable and right now it looks like they need several hundred tutors, program coordinators etc. to do so.

For it to become scalable they have to do something like this https://onemonthrails.com/ for design. ;)

Does a startup need to be scalable on day one? Would you consider Nintendo a scalable company? They started selling cards in the beginning - which isn't very "scalable" in your mind. Would you consider Samsung a scalable high-tech company? They started as a trading company and diversified into textiles, insurance, securities and retail before also adding electronics.

Or to use a more relevant example 37signals, their humble beginnings was a design studio which then had a string of unsuccessful products such as the usability report before finally hitting it big with BaseCamp.

Lots of retail based businesses are highly scalable through a franchise model. If they can nail down the playbook - they can license that and repeat with new locations.