What makes a business scaleable?
The most important quality of scaleability is a large target market. Baby Boomers is a large target market. Something that services the needs of Baby Boomers is not necessarily a product/service that is scaleable unless its sales can be scaled from local to regional to national to global. It can be a very general product such as reading glasses. Reading glasses are making a lot of new revenue for companies that have been around for a while. However, even though this is a product that can be sold to a large target market, it is not likely to become a large company unless it represents a remarkable improvement over what is currently available and/or it leads to the adoption of an entirely new generation of reading or assistance products.
What would make such a company more likely to attract the attention of venture investors is the way it is marketed and distributed. For example: If you set up an online store to sell only the coolest reading glasses plus new innovations in reading glasses, accessories such as lanyards and cases, you still are not reaching a scale that would be considered more than just a nice size boutique. However, if you add other products that make driving safer for people who have failing eyesight, sporty automobiles designed specifically for the older driver, new/green/short-hop pedal-driven transportation that is more comfortable and able to carry more packages than a bicycle, and other truly new and useful products, and you build your online store into a portal for other products and services, your business would be more likely to be considered scaleable enough to attract investor attention. Better yet, you could design and manufacture a product that would be a major new feature of every day life.
Many social networking start-ups received considerable venture investment because they promised to create an online community around a certain demographic. Not only that, they would gather information on the likes, dislikes, needs, wants, and anything else marketers would need to market to that demographic and the social networking promises to present a way to accomplish that marketing.
If someone told you that they would give you $25-million to create a better way to market to Baby Boomers as they retire, what would you create?
What kinds of products would serve a huge target market? It doesn’t need to be Boomers. It can be the children or better yet the grandchildren of Boomers. The kids just entering college in the next year or two are the beginning of a generation that makes the Boomers look small in comparison. What did you need/want when you were their age?
