3 years ago (this month) I wrote this post about the 5 of us here at Schedulefly reaching 3,000 customers. At that time I was writing about it because of how unusual it was to have grown to that point and with that many customers and have just 5 people in the company…who were not in the same office and had actually only once been in the same room together.

Previously we all worked together for a business in Raleigh and worked in offices and saw each other much more. It was a much different company with a company hierarchy where everyone had titles and there were loads of meetings and team lunches and a product roadmap etc. It was a great business – just different. Looking back at those days and then that post from 3 years ago and now today….it’s almost as if fate brought us all together back then as way of ensuring that our future could be different. Maybe even better. I swear – that wasn’t an accident. It was fate. I really believe that. Not many things in life line up like the 5 of us have.

So today I am writing about this because in the coming week or so the 5 of us will be serving 6,000 customers. Still just us 5 – but twice the business.

I am writing about it because we have grown significantly and nothing about our growth has anything to do with hiring or opening offices or expanding internally in any way. Most of what you read on the internet now about technology companies (especially software companies) is about massive amounts of funding and hiring and growing internally. Even if new paying customers are slowly trickling in. That’s crazy, but that’s sexy growth. It’s what the media is looking to write about. It’s sexy for them to post and share Instagram photos of really cool company offices with giant 27in Apple Monitors on office desks and laptops on small tables with loads of employees sitting on bean bags and eating pizza and having stand up meetings where people are literally writing on the dry erase chalkboards that also function as the room’s walls. It’s sexy for them to talk about the recent round of funding that company just received and how they expect to spend it. It makes sense and it’s why we all read about it. It’s fun to read and look at – but damn the overhead and expenses must be stressful to at least one or two people there. I can’t imagine the stress of pulling up to a really cool office filled with smart people and the building pressure of finding customers to pay for it all. I think the stress of being forced to bring on paying customers in order to pay for it would do me in.

For that reason – we still don’t have an office. We have no plans to hire anyone until it’s necessary. We still don’t meet. We still don’t spend a bunch of money. It’s pretty amazing and I thank the other 4 guys for all of it. The cool thing and the reason we can do this is that each year more and more companies enter our market with a similar service and that gives restaurants better choices. These better choices help our relentless effort in staying simple and bringing on the right customers and letting what may be the wrong customer find a better solution. You see – customers that are not just perfect need more from us and have more questions. I’d rather them find a better solution and free up the 5 of us to welcome the right ones. That way we can grow without having to add more overhead.

To finish this up – my main point here is clearly that there are other ways to grow and while it may be much slower and way less sexy, I’d argue that over time that it’s less risky and overall less stressful and can still end up being a really great business. Because it has. I’ve been asked dozens of times why we don’t do grow differently and do things to grow faster and I think it’s because I don’t appear to be stressed and they’ve never heard of us.

So here’s to the other 4 guys in this business and for reaching 6,000 subscribing customers and for staying in our lane. 10,000 is just a matter of time.

Wes