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Based on the article, I believe the author would say that Square is an idea that requires scale, since you "lost money on literally every transaction, but as the number of transactions increased..."

I might be misunderstanding something, but it seems that Square becoming profitable required reaching a certain scale.

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I guess I'm trying to split a hair here, but I feel like some ideas don't even minimally work until there's a critical number of users. Like if you're building a user-contributed database of any kind, it has to be useful at the small size before or else it won't ever grow to be useful at a large size. I feel like I've heard pitches that only talk about the large size. And that process is sometimes separate from the more "business" concerns of cost versus profitability. IDK, the author wasn't totally clear about what domain we were talking about here.

you just helped me understand that the key is probably to very quickly understand whether the thing you're building can remain sustainable without scale, or absolutely needs to hit scale so it can be sustainable, and like you said that hasn't been distinguished in this article...

idk like in my head building a personalized black car service vs. building a bus-service fundamentally requires different conversations around scale b/c of the different domains

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