[codingdave]

Those risks can be mitigated with a scalable business model, which scales up or down. When I first starting getting into the details of running a business, I was taught to always build in a core transaction that is the basis for the revenue. You then budget your expenses based on the actual costs and profit from a single transaction, and scale based on how many transactions actually occur. If your sales slip, your budgets decrease, and you may need to let people go, or take other actions to scale down... but the business itself is still running at a profit. The scenario of having to scale down sucks. But it doesn't have to move you into the red.

I admit that not all business plans can follow this philosophy, in particular if you are of the thinking to get traffic now and monetize later. And I'll work for people running companies who don't follow this philosophy, but I won't run one myself.