Business is about profit, not revenues. $100M revenue is considered a huge number in software because it's assumed that your marginal costs are close to zero, and so that's basically pure profit. $100M in many other industries gives you a decent living in exchange for a lot of work. Hell, I could easily build a billion-dollar business selling $100 bills for $99.99, but I'd lose $100K on it.
Considering you criticize supermarkets for this, consider how the tech "unicorns" usually celebrated on HN are all about revenues (at best), and eyeballs (at worse) and hardly about profit.
Even Amazon took 10+ years to turn actual profits...
There's a complication in that if you're spinning off massive profits per customer but re-investing them in expansion, you won't show any GAAP profits, but your revenue will increase exponentially and as soon as you stop expanding you'll be massively profitable.
Amazon & Uber are in a very different league from say Fab or Homejoy. If your core business segments are profitable but you're investing that money into moving into other segments, then you're in good shape. If you're losing money on every new customer and making it up in volume, you have a problem.
You startup people always make me think I live in the third world :-)
But you're right, $400K is quite a lot of money.
Gotta factor these things in to claims by companies talking razor-thin margins. There's more money to be made than they'd make you think. Although, it's still work to get there as you said.
