I was reading recently about Homejoy(1), yet another of Silicon Valley’s so-called hottest start-ups. The idea was simple: book a home cleaner online, fast and cheap. Investors poured in over $40 million. Growth looked unstoppable. But within five years, Homejoy was gone. Customers tried it once, then disappeared. Service quality slipped as the company expanded too quickly. Deep discounts brought sign-ups, but not loyalty. Retention rates collapsed, and no amount of marketing spend could fix it.
As Geoffrey Moore put it more than 30 years ago(2), scaling is about crossing the chasm between early adopters and the mainstream. Early enthusiasts may forgive your flaws but the mainstream consumers will not. That’s exactly where Homejoy stumbled, and where many other start-ups still fall. They can win early adopters, but they lack the discipline to cross into the mainstream.
I see the same risk closer to home. Many start-ups and scale-ups in services push hard for growth, but they struggle to move beyond their first few customers. For some, growth feels like running on a treadmill: exhausting, but not getting very far. The real question is: how do you step off the treadmill and onto a bicycle that actually takes you further?
I’m using the service industry as the example because the customer relationship is so visible, but the principle travels across any industry. You can have market demand, capital, talent, and infrastructure. Miss the discipline of putting the customer at the centre and building the process around them, and growth won’t turn into scale. That discipline is what turns one-time users into loyal, repeating customers. You could say it’s the rug that really ties the room together(3). Scaling is about guiding customers through five stages (onboarding, activation, repetition, loyalty, and referral) and making each of them reliable.
Onboarding is where it begins. The first encounter must be designed, not improvised. A tutoring session that makes a child feel capable, a fitness class that leaves someone energised, a meal that arrives on time: these are outcomes you can plan for. Checklists, scripts, training, and quality controls may sound dull, but they are what make the first impression reliable instead of accidental.
Next comes activation. A trial is worthless unless it leads to a second use. Consumers need to feel value before the novelty fades. This is where structured follow-up matters: reminders, progress updates, a gentle nudge toward the next booking. This is what activation it’s about: ensuring the customer sees results quickly and clearly.
Then comes repetition and cross-sell. One haircut or yoga class won’t sustain a business. The question is whether you can build routines. This requires predictable scheduling, consistent quality, and staff trained to recognise when to offer the next step: a class pack, a premium tier, a complementary service. With discipline, these opportunities become systematic rather than lucky accidents.
From repetition grows loyalty. And loyalty is not just a warm feeling, but the result of systems that reward commitment. Remembering preferences, celebrating milestones, making the customer feel recognised. All of this can and should be designed into the operation. Loyalty depends on rhythm, and rhythm depends on measurement. So you need to KPI it.
Finally, there is referral, the compounding discipline. And asking nicely is not enough. Referral happen when every earlier step has worked well enough that customers feel safe and even proud to recommend you. Even here, process matters: easy ways to share, visible recognition, structured programs that turn word-of-mouth from an accident into a channel.
Each stage of the lifecycle can be left to chance, or it can be engineered. Scale-ups that grow quickly and collapse just as fast usually relied on chance. The ones that last treat customer success as an operating system: a set of disciplines applied consistently from onboarding to referral.
And then the flywheel is straightforward. A good first encounter, designed by process, leads to activation. Activation routines create repetition. Repetition builds loyalty. Loyalty fuels referral. And referral lowers the cost of the next acquisition. It looks like momentum, but it’s really discipline: small, repeatable actions that compound into habit and habit into growth.
Many things spark growth. Discipline is what keeps it going.
Further Reading
(1) Adrienne Jeffries, Why Homejoy Failed, Wired (2015). Link to article
(2) Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm (1991, revised editions since).
(3) The Big Lebowski (1998), directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. IMDb
Florin Branici 
Leave a comment