AWS Growth Playbook
Selling their own sawdust.
Revenue
$80B+
Strategy
First Mover
The Spark
Amazon built massive infrastructure to handle holiday shopping spikes. Jeff Bezos realized this computing power was a product in itself.
The Growth Engine
Permissionless Innovation Infrastructure: AWS tacticaly targeted the 'Self-Serve' developer. By allowing engineers to provision massive compute power with a credit card—bypassing IT procurement—they triggered a bottom-up revolution. Their growth engine was fueled by 'Service Proliferation'; every new tool (S3, EC2, RDS) created a new entry point for developers. As more startups built on AWS, they created a massive ecosystem of specialized knowledge, making 'AWS proficiency' a career requirement and cementing their role as the world's default cloud OS.