1.
A young boy goes to spend a summer at his grandfather’s farm. At the end of the summer, he tells his grandfather that when he grows up, he’ll only grow bamboo trees. Why? Because they zoomed from 2 feet to 15 feet in 4 months flat!
But then his grandfather explains to him that the growth isn’t instantaneous. It took 4 years of watering and caring for the bamboo tree to grow 2 feet high. And another 4 months for it to grow 15 feet high!
2.
“At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, it boils.
And with boiling water, comes steam. And with steam, you can power a train.One extra degree = Exponential results”
How do you reach that magical 212th degree that brings in the exponential growth?
3.
Put up a magnifying glass in front of grass. And the grass will start burning because the magnifying glass focuses the sun’s rays on the spot.
The sun on its own would never have burnt the grass even after a thousand years. You need focused energy to get going.
Action Summary:
- Find a proven model.
- Put in focused effort.
- Improve everyday.
- And one day – not so far away – you will break through and achieve exponential growth and “overnight success.”
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Case Study of a Business Model With Built In Exponential Growth Factor
Jason Sadler comes up with an idea. He quickly puts up the website IWearYourShirt.com and announces his idea: He would wear other people’s branded t-shirts for a whole day for a fee. And this fee would increase everyday.
- On January 1 2009, it would be $1.
- And everyday it would increase by $1.
- So on January 2, it would be $2.
- And on January 3, it would be $3
- And on December 31st, the cost would be $365.
Because Jason promoted himself everyday via social media network, the companies saw an advantage in paying an extra dollar for every subsequent day too! As a result, Jason booked his entire year.
Do you know how much Jason ended up making at the end of a year? $66,795!
(If you have 35 minutes to spare, you may want to listen to this interview where Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com interviews Jason Sadler.)
More recently, Pinboard.in did something similar. To combat spam, they thought of charging every user of their service a small token fee. But instead of charging a same flat fee to all the users, they decided to charge $0.001 more per new user. This simple tactic means no one procrastinates while signing up. And even though the rate of growth isn’t much, after a while – it starts counting!