Okuzeka
Entrepreneurship & Startups vocabulary · Growth & Traction

Scale

Meaning in entrepreneurship & startups, with examples

/skeɪl/verbCore term

In entrepreneurship & startups, scale means: To grow a business quickly to many more customers, markets or sales without costs and effort growing at the same speed.

In Turkish: ölçeklemek, büyütmek, ölçeklenmek

How it is used

Used constantly in startup talk: we're ready to scale, scaling the team, a scale-up. Investors look for scalable business models, meaning ones that can serve ten times more customers without ten times more cost. Scaling too early, before product-market fit, is a common reason startups fail.

Example sentences

  1. We'll scale to five new cities once the unit economics work in Istanbul.

  2. Scaling the sales team before customers were happy was our biggest mistake.

Common collocations

  • scale up
  • scale the business
  • ready to scale
  • scale fast
  • scalable model
  • growth hackingFast, low-cost experiments across marketing, product and data to find creative ways of getting more users and customers.
  • product-market fitThe stage when a product clearly meets a real need in a large enough market, so customers buy it, keep using it and recommend it without much pushing.
  • unit economicsThe revenue and costs connected to one unit of the business, such as one customer or one order, which show whether each sale makes or loses money.
  • hockey-stick growthA growth pattern where numbers stay flat for a while and then rise very sharply, so the chart looks like a hockey stick.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Growth & Traction

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