In 2023 we turned down two acquisition offers and put a cap on hiring at nine people. Three years on, we're glad we did.
The pitch for growth was familiar: more headcount, more capacity, more recurring revenue, more enterprise value. The math worked on the spreadsheet. The math always works on the spreadsheet.
What the spreadsheet doesn't capture: the moment you cross the team-size threshold where the founder stops touching production code, the client relationships start being managed instead of owned, and the proposals start being written by people who won't deliver them. We've watched our peers cross that threshold. We've also watched their NPS halve over the eighteen months after.
Nine is not magic. It's where we land for what we do, given that we want the same senior engineers in every client conversation. Your number will be different. The honest math is the same: figure out where the relationship-quality cliff is, then stop ten percent before you reach it.