Why your company will never scale (or maybe why it will)

We’re in a copied world. Today, it is so incredibly easy for someone to see what you’re doing and copy your product. So the question is: How do you actually scale your business to the next level? How do you move past being just a "product" and become a trend, or a brand that you actually dream of? I believe it comes down to two things: User Laziness and Competitor Laziness

1. Making the user too lazy to switch:

When you look at Apple, it’s the perfect example. People switch to Apple because of the minimalism, the luxury, or even the peer pressure. But they stay because of the inter-connected interaction. Once you buy one device, you buy the second, then the third. Eventually, the devices are so interconnected that switching onto another provider like Android, feels inefficient. You’ve made the user too lazy to switch because the cost of leaving your ecosystem is too high

-Adobe doesn't just sell Photoshop; they sell a workflow. Once a creative professional has their assets in the Creative Cloud, their fonts synced, and their Lightroom talking to their Premiere Pro, switching to a competitor like Canva or DaVinci Resolve feels inefficient. Even if another tool is cheaper, the user is lazy to leave the ecosystem they’ve built.

-Making the company too lazy to implement;

-The second part of the scaling equation is what the competition is doing or rather, what they aren't doing. Apple implements features that other companies feel too lazy to implement, or quite frankly, too insecure to implement. They take big swings on unconventional features that become the new standard. By the time the competition stops being lazy and tries to copy it, Apple has already moved the needle again.

-For years, traditional car companies were lazy and insecure about going fully electric. They didn't want to build the charging infrastructure because it was too hard and too unconventional. Tesla didn't just build a car; they built the Supercharger network. Now, other car companies are forced to use Tesla’s tech because they were too slow (or too lazy) to build their own.

-When Netflix started producing original content (House of Cards), the big networks were lazy. They thought they could just keep licensing their shows to Netflix forever. They were insecure about changing their cable-TV model. By the time they realized they needed their own streaming services, Netflix had already scaled into a global studio.

-To win in the mass market and truly break the game, you have to implement unconventional things. You have to offer the deals, the features, and the interactions that make the user feel a genuine necessity for your product. It is the most important thing you can do for your business, but it’s also the most difficult. You have to build a world that is so easy to live in, and so hard to leave, that the competition can’t catch up.