Scaling

Scaling, as defined in Wikipedia, means:

“Scaling (geometry), a linear transformation that enlarges or diminishes objects. Scale invariance, a feature of objects or laws that do not change if scales of length, energy, or other variables are multiplied by a common factor. Scaling law, a law that describes the scale invariance found in many natural phenomena.”

The key words, to me, as a legal tech entrepreneur are “do not change if scales of length, energy, or other variables are multiplied…”

I am constantly thinking how do we scale it when a new idea is presented by a LexBlog teammate or customer.

Technologists and developers can do anything, they are smart and talented folks.

But is it in the company’s interest to do what we can?

I was told over twenty years ago by my CTO at Prairelaw.com, later lawyers.com, not to ask my tech team if they can do something. She said they’ll tell you they can do anything.

Years later, my CTO at LexBlog told me we can do anything, but the key is do we want to?

The issue is scaling. Can we build upon on the development we’ve done and sustain the platform we’ve learned to support?

Should we develop something that is rogue to our existing platform? A client may have an idea that is attractive and exciting, but does it scale, or build upon something that we are good at scaling?

Rogue development for custom sites are attractive to company founders, like me, because the projects bring in a lot of money.

I’ll never forget my COO, five or six years ago, telling me, “You have a talented team which can do most anything, resist the temptation to do custom development, it’ll be be best for the company in the long run.”

He was hitting on scaling. LexBlog, over a year, had developed a SaaS platform for the design, hosting and support of blog publications.

Build off of that platform we’ve invested in, a platform our team can support and a platform on which our developers can add features.

One of our goals for 2022 is to examine the limitations of our SaaS blog publishing platform. My gut tells me the team will look at refinements and features for improvements, as opposed to any major changes. Scaling.

On syndication portals, we have less of a track record in having run them for only a little over a year. But so far so good as far as customers are concerned.

Being that the LexBlog site is in essence a portal site, in aggregating and curating the publishing of legal bloggers, we’ll likely scale all we do on aggregation, curation and search through our portal product.

LexBlog as a portal and our customer and partner aggregation and curation sites, both scaled as portals. We’ll develop enhancements as new features. We’ll serve customer needs, both that they see and that we see for them, through the portal platform.

To go rogue, off the platforms, may be fun and bring in revenue in the short term, but wouldn’t scale, the essence of creating a subscription revenue company and a company creating value by virtue of its platform and systems.