
Ask HN: What would you do to 10x an existing business? - patrics123
Imagine you have an existing business at your hands. You have one or more products, some cash in the bank and a customer base of a few hundred B2B customers.<p>If you had 12 months to 10x the revenue &#x2F; profit - what would you do? What steps would you try?<p>If you had 3 years, would you do something different?
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muzani
Target about 5% week on week growth. If you have $1000 in sales this week,
you'll want $1050 in sales next week, $1200 weekly sales in a month, , $12,600
weekly in a year.

This is actually a very conservative growth chart. Personally if I couldn't
get 7% week on week growth, I'd worry about my business model.

If you can just hit this, you'll be fine.

If you don't, this is where all the startup frameworks kick in. You can set up
a Business Model Canvas, look at whether your assumptions are correct. Attack
either the low hanging fruit or the riskiest assumption. If you can fix the
highest risk items, you can usually start generating good growth without any
paid marketing.

Normally the problem is that the business hasn't hit product-market fit.
Either the product isn't good enough, or it hasn't been able to expand or
pitch itself into the market. When you hit product market fit, you'll be
dealing with some crazy growth and struggle to keep up.

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charleyma
answer would be it very much depends, some considerations that I would want to
know:

\- big difference between 10x revenue vs profit, what's the current cost basis
/ margin in the product? \- evaluating current marketing efforts, how much
demand is from inbound vs outbound, what's working and what's not \- pricing,
is the product being priced correctly \- cost factors: support,
infrastructure, salary, anything around cost of goods sold \- what's the
current revenue base? I would argue going from 100k MRR -> 1m MRR is a lot
easier than going from 1m -> 10MM, that requires a lot more coordination and
most likely enterprise customers \- existing customer base, do I have success
selling into some enterprise vs selling into longtail b2b segment

if I just had 1 year, I would be biased towards trying to focus on my core
products and growing them, however if I don't have a large enough addressable
market and I needed to 10x in 12 months, then I would focus much more on
product development +R&D

if I had 3 years, I think the strategy would be similar, but with longer time
spans to test different strategies

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twunde
Assuming it's a somewhat mature product, I'd suggest reading "It's not luck"
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It's aimed at mature companies, but it has several
ideas worth investigating such as segmenting the market

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AznHisoka
It depends on how serious this question is.

If you're dead serious, I'll allocate a certain % of the current revenue to
buy puts/calls on a public company, and hope I'm right.

Why? Because if I knew a way to 10X the profit, I'd already done so.

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tarr11
It depends on what you are growing at right now. If you are doing 10x YOY,
keep doing the same.

If you are doing 10% YOY then going to Vegas and betting it all on red would
be a good choice.

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viyu
Sounds good. It's what the FedEx founder did with the remaining company money.
They had only one week left of runaway, he gambled it and it seems to have
worked [http://for-starters.com/from-grade-c-to-the-skies-fedex-
stor...](http://for-starters.com/from-grade-c-to-the-skies-fedex-story/)

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taprun
I would look to improve the pricing strategy. You wouldn't believe how a few
changes to a pricing page can improve a business' bottom line.

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segmondy
Go get 20x the customers. Go and sell everyday.

