From launch to sustained business - scaling talk with Navot Volk

Navot Volk - tech entrepreneur with 14 years of experience in consulting startups. Navot led the development of a large project at WIX with a multi-million-dollar budget and a team of more than 80 experts. At the moment, the project has gained millions of users. Navot gives his expertise about product scaling and its significance for product development.

Navot Volk has a tech background. He spent most of his time as a leader in software development projects, and most of his life deals with startups and building business digital products.

If you hold a gun to my head, I will say I’m a product guy more than an entrepreneur or anything else.

Let’s define the concept: what happens after a digital product launch? It’s product scaling. How to organize it, how to set up the team, what challenges may arise, and how we can avoid them.

The key factor for product scaling is to understand what stage you are in. There's a different scale from zero to one, one to 10, one to 100, etc. Ask yourself what is the most important thing to do in order to get to the next phase. A lot of entrepreneurs are confused by the number of things that need to be done. It’s wrong. Focus on the problem you have here and now. Let's say, you already have 10 customers, how do you get 100? Not 1 000 or 1 000 000. You will think about it at the next stages.

The difference between product scaling and product growth. Growth is about marketing. You can grow very quickly, but you can fail if your product isn't able to maintain all this growth. How to maintain it? Scaling helps to do it. It ensures your product is supported by more people and shows the ways of saving your customers.

Much more important is what not to do rather than what to do.

Some product owners, realizing it’s time to scale, are afraid of doing it. Most of all, they are afraid of making a mistake. First, make a decision, and then figure out if it is right or not. You will never figure out a problem without actually doing it.

If needed, change your direction, but make a decision.

The difference between scaling a digital product for a startup, and for the existing business. In both cases, you need to focus and only focus on what's important for the product, and how to measure and niche it. There's no defined challenge, no book you can read about it, no exact recipe. You should constantly scale your product.

You have to build, and iterate, and iterate, and iterate and do it fast.

Defining timelines of product development, there’s no formula. You should define your timeline based on your exact product. As long as you know your timeline, and you're aligned with everyone in your team in your company, then great.

There's no silver lining, there's no magic bullet that you know, how much time it should be.

The secret to having a great rise in users is always talking to customers, about what they like, think, and how to use the product. Really know your customers. Get feedback from email, and online meetings.

If you solve a problem for one customer, there's a huge chance to solve it for 1000 more.

“About what I would like to do differently, it's always easy to connect the dots after it happened. It’s a hard question. We would offer more plugins, more connection to third-party applications; we will have a better experience for users.”

“Talking about a team, only hire people when you really need them. I need to work with people that have strong careers.”

“The main advice for everybody getting ready to scaling is a focus, and focus, and focus. The biggest challenge for a manager is not to decide what to do, but what not to do.”

If you want to hear the full story of Navot Volk, where he tells why he is more of a product guy, how to increase your audience, how to understand it’s time to scale your product, and how to do it efficiently, listen to our new podcast.