Being able to get any book you want at a lower price than at the shop around the corner made Amazon a particularly attractive option for many consumers, and focusing on this lone enterprise helped Amazon develop a loyal, resilient consumer base that grew organically with the company. As a merchant bookseller in 1995, Amazon had ready access to wholesale-priced books and benefitted from the huge advantage over traditional book retailers of operating without the costs and limitations of a brick and mortar storefront. It’s hard to imagine that the biggest online retailer in the United States began as a simple online bookstore, but Jeff Bezos accomplished exactly that, meticulously cultivating Amazon’s growth from day one.

To illustrate this trend, let’s take a look at a few examples of companies that started out with a product that they then leveraged into a development platform. When we’re talking about digital companies & products, this model looks a little different and leans more towards horizontal scalability – pivoting from a product-oriented company to a platform-based one is becoming a more and more common method of generating growth in the digital age. Bigger factories making more products shipping to more countries – vertical scalability is the model that might come to mind when you think about how product-oriented companies typically grow.

Intuit quickbooks 2015 amazon