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Comment by dreyfan | Hacker News Reader

I run a small company of 4 people and we're currently at a $2.3M annualized run-rate. Fully remote keeps our opex very low: only about $125k excluding salaries.

I do feel we've hit a wall though, as our revenue has been ~$2M/yr for the past three years with a fairly consistent team size. We have had difficulty finding the right people who can incrementally grow revenue.

That said our primary competitor has ~80 employees and has to keeps raising more VC (we're 100% revenue funded) while their customers keep churning and showing up on our doorstep.

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You mention a few things I'd love for you to unpack further if you feel willing.

[1] You mention you have your competitor's customers churning onto your doorstep, yet your revenue is flat. Is your flat revenue then related to price cuts, or do you have churn of your own that offsets those gains?

[2] You imply that you think your team size may be the reason for having hit a wall. Care to elaborate on these thoughts?

[3] What is the current team structure (how many eng, marketing, biz, etc.)? You mention finding the right people to incrementally grow revenue.

Just another entrepreneur curious to learn from your experience growing a bootstrapped company. My co-founder and I raised a round last summer, and we're currently at 3 headcount (two of us, plus one hire that started in October in an area we have zero expertise in, but is critical to our business and credibility). We discuss what the inflection points are that will drive additional headcount, and for now that's almost exclusively revenue growth.

[1] We actually closed 2017 at $1.9M but we're already at $2.3M ARR heavily due to those recent inbound. It's been a fairly consistent and frustrating ebb and flow. We'll often get a new product launched and see uptake just about the time we lose a different product.

[2] I feel like we have a pretty solid model at this point in terms the steps to create a new successful product, but I tend to do all those steps and I've definitely hit the wall on not having enough hours in the day. In the past I think our failure was trying to hire people to replicate that process across new people. It's been tough finding capable people. I very often have the crippling thought of "This is taking so long, and so much of my time, I should just do it myself". This year we're switching things up to instead try and delegate my existing responsibilities as much as possible and free up my own time for new product development instead.

[3] 3 engineering (me + 2 eng) and 1 biz/sales (co-founder). Engineering/Data side is absolutely our bottleneck. I've had a lot of difficulty (I'm a poor people manager and terrible at hiring) in finding the right people. Generally speaking I think generalists with a keen eye for the bottom-line would be the most helpful (e.g. tech entrepreneurs) but those people tend all have their own startups or golden handcuffs.

My advice would absolutely to keep things small as possible as long as possible. Identify areas you can automate to free up your time, and prioritize work based upon revenue-potential. Avoid doing stuff that engineers love (let's rewrite our stack in Go and React!) and stick to your core proficiencies. Clients rarely care what technology you use, they care about whether or not it solves their problems. If you have any control over it at this point, go for clients that have a lot of money. It's a hell of a lot easier to manage one big client paying $250k a year than it is to manage 2,500 small-business clients very upset your $10/mo product doesn't precisely meet their specific needs.

curious as to specifics of your team/what you guys are solving? My contact info is in my profile if you don't mind connecting.

I'd be interested to hear, too, if OP is comfortable sharing.

Wow, congratulations! I think you've described a dream case for many people. Hope you find a resolution to the revenue wall soon.

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