Staff size is not your obstacle to growth. It’s not.
Adding staff, after a certain point, will actually decrease productivity at the margin.
This ties back to the benefits of businesses that are scalable.
You might need one more employee to service five more accounts in a service based business.
But a software-based one does not suffer from this.
Let’s not spend a few million dollars learning this the hard way.
In May 2012, Moz raised $18 million in a Series B round, and something strange happened: everyone suddenly wanted to be a manager. After the cash injection, we went a little overboard trying to grow the team with the false belief that more people meant we could build more and better stuff faster. As anyone who’s worked in software will tell you, a team of ten engineers, rather than five, working on the same project is more likely to double the time it takes to finish rather than halve it. But we hadn’t yet learned this lesson, and so, believing that staff size was holding us back, invested relentlessly in recruiting.
-Rand Fishkin, Lost And Founder