The Accelerator Conundrum: The Premature Blitzscaling Pressure

The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus on customers, revenues and profits. 1Mby1M’s mission is to help a Million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue and beyond. Sramana’s Digital Mind AI Mentor virtually mentors entrepreneurs around the world in 57 languages. Try it out!

One of the most insidious pressures exerted by the typical 3-month accelerator model is the relentless push for premature blitzscaling. 

The entire program is geared towards showing rapid growth metrics by Demo Day, regardless of whether that growth is sustainable, profitable, or even desirable at such an early stage. 

This focus on manufactured velocity, more often than not, becomes a recipe for disaster, not genuine disruption.

True business building is an iterative process. You first need to achieve deep product-market fit, understand your customer acquisition channels, and validate your business model at a small, manageable scale. 

Only then should you consider blitzscaling. 

Accelerators, however, often reverse this logical sequence. They push founders to acquire users, generate velocity and expand operations before they truly understand their unit economics or have solidified their core offering.

This premature scaling leads to churn, an unsustainable burn rate, a desperate chase for vanity metrics, and a constant need for more funding to keep the artificial growth engine sputtering along. 

You end up hiring too fast, spending too much on marketing, and generally expanding before your foundations are solid. 

This isn’t building a resilient business. It’s inflating a balloon that’s prone to bursting. 

Many promising startups have withered and died from being forced to blitzscale before they were ready. 

Balloons, inevitably, burst.

Photo Credit: WikiImages from Pixabay

This segment is a part in the series : The Accelerator Conundrum