Let me start a chain that will beat McDonalds. I will launch with much fanfaire. I will advertise how I have better ingredients, healthier, bigger meals with better happy meal toys, all at the same price.

Lots of customers will come on day one. The extremely long queue forces me to enlarge my kitchen, build multiple stores and rapidly expand my workforce… none of them will be adequately trained, nor do I have the necessary logistics to maintain my quality and improve my products.

Then the QQ hits. My burgers aren’t as meaty. My vegetables aren’t as fresh as I said (well… just how fresh can vegetables get?), the stores put less sauce than advertised to be cheap… the customer service suck – someone spots them out the back smoking. People rate me down on facebook/blogs/twitter, saying I’m no better than McDonalds.

Then somebody finds a bug in one of my burgers forcing me to defend my ingredients and suppliers. Lots of nay-sayers come and smear my chain.

I’m now employing far more people and has far too many stores to sustain my customers. I’m forced to fire some.

Nay-sayers return and proclaim it’s the end of my chain…

I close shops. A dream dies. I am no better.

—

Perhaps success can no longer come in a big bang. Many of the recent stories I see are smaller companies not caring to be number 1. They find a market and tries to cater to that. People are happy playing Fallen Earth, Eve Online, Restuarant City. None of these ever claimed to be a wow-killer, and their fans have no such preconception about what the game is or isn’t.

I see my neighborhood successful eateries – they start small. Then they build a local customer base, then they adjust and expand the menu and get a name for themselves in the city. Eventually they expand their store – best by buying out the next door store and combining the two shop fronts – otherwise some have moved to a larger premise nearby and maintained the customers.