As Drift grew to thousands of customers and hundreds of employees, Elias Torres found his time consumed by managing people, not talking to customers. He intimately felt the pain of losing that direct connection, realizing that by the time a CSM flags a churn risk, it's often too late. This pain directly inspired his next company.
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The popular pursuit of massive user scale is often a trap. For bootstrapped SaaS, a sustainable, multi-million dollar business can be built on a few hundred happy, high-paying customers. This focus reduces support load, churn, and stress, creating a more resilient company.
After scaling to 300 employees created more problems than it solved, Briq's founder now believes headcount is a poor measure of success. He argues that ARR per employee is the true "flex," promoting capital efficiency and focus over a bloated team size.
Scaling to $2M ARR with only two co-founders led to severe burnout and created a business entirely dependent on them. This made it difficult to step away or sell, highlighting the risk of staying too lean for too long.
Despite Drift's massive success, co-founder Elias Torres reflects that the product was ultimately "shallow." It excelled at the first customer connection (lead capture) but failed to carry that context through the entire customer journey. This created a fragmented experience and limited its depth, a key learning for his new company, Agency.
During a 5x growth period, Fixer's support response times went from 5 minutes to 5 hours, jeopardizing customer trust. The team had only planned for their growth strategies failing, not succeeding. This highlights the critical need to build infrastructure for best-case scenarios, not just worst-case ones.
Founder Sam Darawish argues that a healthy, moderate growth rate (25-30%) is often better than chasing venture-backed hyper-growth. He believes rapid growth can lead to taking on non-ICP customers, which pulls the product in multiple directions, wastes resources, and ultimately thins the team's focus.
Founders often fear scaling a service business because they believe only they can provide the 'personal touch.' This is an ego-driven bottleneck. The correct approach is to hire, accept that mistakes will happen, fire underperformers, and use sincere apologies and refunds to repair client relationships. Service failures are a predictable cost of scaling.
The founding team's ethos was to meet early customers in person, which built deep relationships and product insights. This hands-on approach was crucial for the first 10 customers but proved unscalable. Hitting 50 customers forced them to hire their first designer specifically to automate and systematize the onboarding process.