Always seems like it's the middle that's hard. You can become a mass car maker if you can commit to shifting 100,000+ cars per year, or you can be a niche player making 200 cars by hand, but how do you make 15,000 cars? You can be a DTC brand dropshipping 5000 units per year as a hobby and buying ads on Facebook, or be massive, buy space in retailers, invest in brand advertising and churn out millions of products. But being in the middle is hard. You can be a thrusting start up breaking little laws, or skirting regulations knowing if you probably won't get noticed, and if you do you won't destroy a brand with heritage and value. Or you can be a huge companies with the best lawyers around, but being medium sized is hard. It's not incredibly hard to be small, it's not hard to stay big, but it's hard for small to scale to big, and it's hard for big to act or do small. A lot of startup life is burning rocket fuel (cash) to escape the earth's gravitational pull ( unit economics). A lot of brands still haven't made it to orbit, but we celebrate their altitude, even though it means a crash to earth would be even more devastating. …see more