Impaciente com os lucros e paciente com o volume

Na senda do que aconselha Steve Blank, iterar (pivotar) até encontrar a fórmula lucrativa e só então escalar:
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"Clayton Christensen would agree with the intuition that Groupon displays but ignores: businesses should become profitable before they become big. The best way to manage a fledgling business is for managers to be impatient for profit but patient for growth. (Moi ici: Um velho marcador nosso conhecido e aplaudido) Such a strategy limits an early venture's funding in order to force the business to develop a profitable business model and then invests heavily in growth once such a model is identified (Moi ici: Recordar Blank aqui e aqui) — Christensen terms such investments "good money" for incubating growth businesses and extols the strategy for three reasons.

• First, when a business is impatient for profit, managers are forced to validate their assumptions and demonstrate that customers are fundamentally willing to pay an acceptable price for the company's offering.
• Secondly, expecting a business to be profitable quickly forces it to keep its fixed costs low. Because a business's cost structure determines which customers it finds profitable, keeping these fixed costs low preserves strategic options for the company when it is choosing which customers to target.
• Finally, reaching profitability quickly ensures that when outside financing dries up, the venture can succeed on its own.

Groupon's fundamental problem is that it has not yet discovered a viable business model. The company asserts that it will be profitable once it reaches scale but there is little reason to believe this.
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The story would be much different if Groupon did not have nearly unlimited access to funding so early in its corporate life. A successful financing strategy would have provided Groupon with incremental investments to enable the development of a profitable business model around a product that had obvious appeal to customers and merchants.(Moi ici: Como referimos aqui, a maior partes das vezes não é a pobreza que mata uma start-up, é o excesso de dinheiro) In such a world, Groupon would have stuck to its home market of Chicago until it developed a business model that was profitable at scale in one market. Armed with a viable profit formula, Groupon could have scaled aggressively — confident that much larger profits awaited it."
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Trecho retirado de "Groupon Doomed by Too Much of a Good Thing"