Entrepreneurs, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. When building a business, what did you find more difficult: going from Zero to One (starting from scratch, finding product-market fit, first customers) or scaling it from One to Hundred (scaling operations, growing revenue, managing larger teams)?
I'm sure both stages come with unique challenges, but I'd love to hear your experiences and perspectives. What stage took more effort, time, and resources? And why?
What Is More Challenging: Zero to One or One to Hundred?
byu/Right_Tiger7626 inEntrepreneur
Posted by Right_Tiger7626
15 Comments
zero to one
Definitely one to hundred for me. I got somewhat lucky with my business and made ~$4k revenue in my first month. It only took me about a week to launch (between idea generation, website creation, and marketing outreach). The hard part was keeping the business running and scaling it. I’m not good at managing people and have had problems with hiring and maintaining contractors. I’m still having trouble with this, 4 years later. I generate revenue each month, but it’s slowly been dropping as time goes on.
One to one hundred for me.
Got a king crab go box 30 and its been nothing short of excellent.
From zero to one you are a true entrepreneur – from one to a hundred you are a true businessman – just my personal feelings tbh.
Zero to One is easy in my opinion, I can make a few dozen products in a single year, they don’t need to be perfect. A minimum viable product will suffice in the majority of cases.
Getting one of them to go to a hundred is incredibly difficult and rare.
One to one hundred in our small company because the zero to one was already proven. We just needed to carve our space in the market
This is a personal question. For me – 0 to hundred is much more difficult. In fact, I gave up daily control 3 years ago because I realized I was part of the problem trying to scale. I also hate the process and redtape needed to scale. We’re at 120 right now and scaling to the next level sucks.
Depends.
If you build a marketplace/community quite steep to acquire first customers. But after that it is relatively easier to manage.
Service/product based startups is easier to start off but the hustle doesn’t come down much with the time .
Two different skillsets required: zero to one (in the peter thiel mindset) kind of requires you to innovate / create something new, and it may be hard to have an eye for this. This may also be more accidental / dependant on specific skills. Often zero to one happens because you work/are interested in one field and through this passion/time spent in the field you notice a gap.
One to hundred is something that mainly requires skill/work/luck. This will most likely not happen by accident. I’d argue you can also learn how to do one to hundred (atleast within s specific field), but it is much harder to learn how to do one to zero. One kind of proof for this is just how many private equity firms there are/early stage investors.
Simply; one to hundred tends to be more formulaic than zero to one. So basically zero to one is easier ”physically” but in a way much harder to find a method to the madness, while one to hundred can be somewhat taught but will probably require much more actual work.
I think it is more about personality (e.g. where your natural core competency lies). For the creative, zero to one is easier. For the less creative but operationally minded, 1 to 100.
One to 100
It depends on the scale meant here. Let’s say 0 to 1 means 0-1k MRR. That, for me, has been fairly easy to accomplish. 1k-100k MRR, well. Still working on that..
Zero to one.
One to one hundred.
Zero to one is just throwing things at the wall.
One to one hundred is learning and fine tuning.