I lost $42,000 in three months because I listened to a guy with a blue checkmark on Twitter who told me that if I wasn’t growing, I was dying. It was 2018, a Tuesday in November, and I was sitting in a shared office space in Chicago that smelled faintly of burnt espresso and desperation. I had this little SaaS tool called DraftFlow. It was doing okay. We had about 400 paying users, making maybe $9,000 a month. It was enough to live on, but the internet told me that was ‘lifestyle business’ territory, which is apparently a slur in the tech world. So I decided to scale. I hired two ‘Growth Lead’ contractors, cranked my LinkedIn ad spend to $300 a day, and started building features I thought ‘enterprise’ customers wanted. It was a total disaster.

The Tuesday I realized I was an idiot

By February, my bank account looked like a crime scene. Those contractors? They were great at making slide decks with pretty arrows pointing up and to the right, but they didn’t know the first thing about my actual product. I spent exactly 142 hours that quarter on ‘strategic alignment’ meetings. Do you know how many hours I spent talking to my actual customers? Six. Maybe seven. I was so busy trying to build a rocket ship that I forgot I was supposed to be building a tool that actually helped people write better documentation. I remember staring at a Stripe notification for a $15 refund and feeling like the world was ending because my ‘CAC to LTV ratio’—a phrase I still hate—was completely out of whack. I was redlining the engine while the car was still in neutral.

What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Scaling is just a polite way of saying you’re running out of excuses for why your product isn’t perfect yet. When you’re small, you can hide behind the ‘we’re a scrappy startup’ label. When you scale, you’re just a big target with a lot of overhead.

Scaling fast isn’t a strategy; it’s a gamble where the house usually wins and you end up back in a cubicle at a company you hate.

Why your ‘Growth Strategy’ is probably just a fever dream

Most of the advice you see about scaling comes from people who are playing with other people’s money. If you’re bootstrapped, you aren’t playing the same game as a VC-backed firm in Palo Alto. They have a mandate to grow or explode. You have a mandate to survive. I see so many founders trying to mimic the ‘blitzscaling’ model, and it’s like watching a toddler try to run a marathon because they saw a pro do it on TV. It doesn’t work. You just trip and break your nose. I know people will disagree with me here, and they’ll point to the one-in-a-million success stories, but for every Slack, there are ten thousand charred remains of companies that tried to hire their way out of a mediocre product-market fit.

I used to think that hiring was the solution to every bottleneck. I was completely wrong. Hiring is usually the cause of the bottleneck. You add a person, you add communication overhead. You add two people, you’ve suddenly got a ‘culture’ to manage instead of a codebase. I once hired a developer because I thought we needed to move faster on a mobile app. It took me four months to realize that the mobile app was a stupid idea to begin with, but I kept him on because I felt guilty. That’s not scaling; that’s just expensive charity.

Numbers don’t lie. People do.

The math that actually matters (and it’s not MRR)

Everyone talks about Monthly Recurring Revenue like it’s the only metric that exists. It’s not. The metric that actually matters for a bootstrapped founder is what I call the ‘Sanity-to-Sorrow’ ratio. How much of your day is spent doing things that actually move the needle versus how much is spent managing the chaos you created by growing too fast? I tracked my focus for 12 weeks using a physical notebook in 2021. I found that 88% of my ‘scaling’ activities were actually just busy work to avoid talking to angry customers who were annoyed that the core product was getting buggier as we added more bells and whistles.

• Customer Support Volume: If this triples while your revenue only doubles, you’re failing.
• Churn Rate: Scaling fast often means attracting ‘low-intent’ users who leave after a month.
• Technical Debt: I’ve seen codebases that look like a game of Jenga played by a drunk person because the team was ‘moving fast and breaking things.’
• Your Sleep: I averaged 4 hours a night during my ‘scaling’ phase. I was a miserable human being.

I might be wrong about this, but I think most founders would be ten times happier if they just capped their growth at 5% a month and focused on making their existing users obsessed with them. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that if we aren’t the next unicorn, we’re failures. It’s a lie. A profitable, slow-growing company is a miracle. A fast-growing, burning-cash company is a liability.

I hate HubSpot and I’m not sorry

This is going to sound like a tangent, but stay with me. I refuse to recommend HubSpot to any of my friends starting out, even though every ‘growth’ blog says it’s the gold standard. Why? Because their pricing tiers are designed to trap you. You start at $20 and suddenly you’re at $800 because you dared to have more than a handful of contacts. It’s the software equivalent of a predatory loan. It encourages this mindset that you need ‘enterprise-grade’ tools before you even have an enterprise-grade problem. I’ve seen founders spend more time configuring their CRM than they spent talking to their first ten customers. It’s a distraction. It’s a vanity project disguised as infrastructure.

I know I’m being unfair. HubSpot is a massive, successful company. But for a bootstrapper? It’s a weight around your neck. You don’t need a flywheel; you need a product that doesn’t suck. I’ve bought the same $12 basic-ass email tool three times for different projects because it just works. I don’t care if something ‘better’ or ‘more scalable’ exists. I want the thing that lets me go to sleep at night without wondering if I’m being overcharged for features I don’t use.

Stop doing that.

The part nobody talks about

There’s this weird psychological toll that comes with scaling fast. When you’re small, you’re a person. When you scale, you become a ‘Founder & CEO.’ People start treating you differently. Your employees don’t tell you the truth because they’re afraid for their jobs. Your investors (if you have them) only care about the numbers. It’s lonely. I remember sitting in a fancy steakhouse with a ‘growth consultant’ who was charging me $250 an hour to tell me things I already knew. I felt like a fraud. I missed the days when it was just me and a laptop in a coffee shop, actually building things.

I tested 6 different project management tools over 3 years and tracked my team’s output. You know what worked best? A shared Google Doc. All the ‘scaling’ software in the world couldn’t replace a simple list of things to do. We think we need to scale our systems, but usually, we just need to simplify our goals. I spent $12,450 on a ‘Scale Masterclass’ in 2021. I learned exactly one thing: how to sell a $12,450 course to suckers like me. I’m still annoyed about that.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that growth is like an over-watered tomato plant. You think you’re helping it by giving it more and more, but eventually, the roots rot because they can’t breathe. You get a lot of green leaves but no actual fruit. I’ve seen so many startups that are all leaves and no fruit. They look great on LinkedIn, but they’re empty inside. They have ‘Head of People’ and ‘Chief Growth Officer’ but they don’t have a profit margin.

I genuinely don’t know if it’s possible to stay small forever in this economy. Maybe the ‘grow or die’ people are right in the long run. But I do know that growing too fast is the quickest way to kill the thing you loved building in the first place. I’d rather have a business that grows at the speed of a tree than one that grows at the speed of a wildfire. One provides shade; the other just leaves ashes.

Does anyone actually enjoy the ‘scale’ phase, or are we all just pretending because we’re afraid to look lazy?