Initially, 6AM City hired two editors per market. Over time, they discovered a more efficient model: empowering a single, autonomous local editor and centralizing all other operations (marketing, sales support, design). This streamlined the process, reduced overhead, and allowed the local editor to focus purely on creating a high-quality, localized product.
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To scale a testing program effectively, empower distributed marketing teams to run their own experiments. Providing easy-to-use tools within a familiar platform (like Sitecore XM Cloud) democratizes the process, leveraging local and industry-specific knowledge while avoiding the bottleneck of a central CRO team.
For lean teams, success isn't about matching the scale of larger competitors. It's about achieving surgical precision. Deep clarity on user needs, messaging, and positioning allows a small team to create an impact that outperforms the "noise" generated by better-resourced but less focused rivals.
6AM City found that their lowest-spending advertisers often required the most sales and fulfillment effort. To solve this, they created a self-serve portal for smaller, one-off ad buys. This automated process freed their sales team from low-AOV transactions to focus on larger, regional, and national clients, dramatically improving team efficiency and revenue focus.
Contradicting the common startup goal of scaling headcount, the founders now actively question how small they can keep their team. They see a direct link between adding people, increasing process, and slowing down, leveraging a small, elite team as a core part of their high-velocity strategy.
Large corporations can avoid stagnation by intentionally preserving the "scrappy" entrepreneurial spirit of their early days. This means empowering local teams and market leaders to operate with an owner's mindset, which fosters accountability and keeps the entire organization agile and innovative.
Gamma's CEO resists the pressure to scale headcount aggressively, arguing that doubling the team size does not guarantee double the speed. He believes a smaller, more agile team can change direction faster, which is more valuable than raw speed in a rapidly evolving market.
Forcing innovations to "scale" via top-down mandates often fails by robbing local teams of ownership. A better approach is to let good ideas "spread." If a solution is truly valuable, other teams will naturally adopt it. This pull-based model ensures change sticks and evolves.
Instead of subscriber counts, 6AM City uses a specific revenue threshold to decide when to staff an AI-powered "seed" market with a human editor. Once an automated newsletter can generate enough revenue to cover an editor's salary (e.g., $5,000/month for a $60,000/year role), the company invests. This ensures financially sustainable, de-risked expansion.
Spreading excellence should not be like applying a thin coat of peanut butter across the whole organization. Instead, create a deep "pocket" of excellence in one team or region, perfecting it there first. That expert group then leads the charge to replicate their success in the next pocket, creating a cascading and more robust rollout.
Gamma scaled to a $2B valuation with only 50 people by innovating on org design, not just product. They prioritize hiring generalists over specialists and use a 'player-coach' model instead of a traditional management layer. This keeps the team lean, agile, and close to the actual work.
