Blitzscaling a Consumer Product Business
Is it possible to blitzscale a consumer product company towards profitability? Can you adapt it for today’s fundraising and economic climate? What if you want to move fast and not break things?
I first heard about blitzscaling when I went to see Reid Hoffman give a talk at the London Guildhall Centre in 2018. I subsequently bought the book and read it along with my other library of startup-related literature. I guess it’s now a classic.
Coined by Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and his collaborator Chris Yeh, blitzscaling describes a business strategy that values speed and market dominance above all else. It is the art—some might say the gamble—of scaling a company at lightning speed, often at the expense of short-term profits and operational sanity 🤪
The term blitzscaling has typically only been applied to the software companies in Silicon Valley and this method of growth has dominated the way founders have built businesses over the last few decades.
The philosophy is simple: the company that grows fastest wins. But this is not growth in the measured, deliberate sense of the word. Blitzscaling is about explosive, often chaotic, expansion. It is a strategy for seizing markets, even when the company’s infrastructure is not yet built to handle the weight of its own ambition.
It is absolutely expected - prided even - for you to fuck up. To have things break, for people sue you and for some awful awful Glassdoor reviews. None of this matters if you are growing. In the wake of female founders being routinely cancelled, I remember agonising over my employee happiness only for a prominent investor to tell me one of his most favourite and successful CEOs had a near zero Glassdoor rating. To be honest, it was taught that - if things were going smoothly then you probably weren’t doing it right.
Most companies that blitzscale are loss-making and they’re happy to lose money on each transaction for the sake of owning the market. There was the belief that as soon as you turned on monetisation and turned off ads, hey presto! You’ll be profitable!
The famous Sliceline growth episode...
This is a far cry from traditional business wisdom, which prizes efficiency, operational discipline, and sustainable growth. For the blitzscaler, those virtues are secondary concerns, if they are concerns at all. It’s what old people do. The main thing that matters is speed, because when investors look at your numbers it’s not just how much you grow, but quickly you do it.
And to make all of this chaos possible you need money. Venture capital is the oxygen of blitzscaling. Large injections of cash allow these companies to fuel their rapid growth, funding aggressive hiring, product development, and marketing efforts, even when revenues fail to keep pace.
For the venture capitalist, the bet is straightforward: the company that captures the most market share in the shortest amount of time will become dominant enough to justify the early losses. Investors believed that the goal isn’t profitability—at least, not at first. The goal is to become so large, so quickly, that competitors either run outta money or are left scrambling for the scraps.
But these times are they are a’changing, and in this awful awful market, investors want profitable companies before they will even consider writing a cheque.
So I’ve been wondering lately:
Is it possible to blitzscale a consumer product company towards profitability? Can you take the core of the thesis and adapt it for today’s fundraising and economic climate? What if you want to move fast and not break things?
Here are four product-based businesses that have scaled their consumer products rapidly using some blitzscaling principles. Let’s take a look at them…
