I have been thinking lately about how hard it is to scale start-ups. The Lean Start-Up movement, as exemplified in Eric Ries’ book The Lean Start-Up, has appropriately focused a great deal of attention on the hard decisions and techniques required to create a company from nothing. But once the company has honed in on a strong value proposition and found initial product-market fit, what is the best approach to scaling it? And what lessons can be applied to the early decisions you make as a start-up? After all, scaling is hard. Really hard.