Akeel JabberInvestment Director, Horizen Capital · Investor, Entrepreneur and Petroleum Engineer

Grow with Your Audience, Not Revenue

26 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:05

In this brief dialogue, two speakers discuss the pitfalls of scaling developer headcount in SaaS businesses and advocate for a more measured, audience‑centric growth approach. Speaker A highlights that developers are expensive and that adding 4‑7 engineers may be sufficient, emphasizing the value of moving slowly and aligning growth with product and audience needs rather than revenue spikes. Speaker B acknowledges the novelty of the advice, noting how many firms mistakenly increase headcount as revenue rises, whereas the product’s quality and audience demand should dictate scaling. The conversation also reflects on how traditional assumptions—where larger headcounts equated to higher investment and profit—are outdated in the modern SaaS, AI‑driven, online landscape, where lean teams can still achieve profitability.

Sometimes it's also like people are just, especially in SaaS, overhead is a huge thing, right? They're just getting like 4, 5, 6, 7 developers on board, which is not bad at all, but developers are really expensive. Yeah. And sometimes it's better to move slowly forward instead of too fast. Yeah. And just grow with the product. Yeah. Grow with the audience and not with the revenue. That's something that I would just definitely also take care of.
That's a really good, you know, That's good advice. I like to hear, I haven't heard that before, but grow with your audience and not grow with your revenue, but that's very hard, right? A lot of people think of, hey, we're growing revenue, let's grow headcount. You're just saying, hey, let the audience decide. It's like, no, your product is good. Maybe you don't need to, you know, make too many changes and it's like, just work for what you need to make.
That's actually a bit old-fashioned. In the past, when you're just looking on like big companies, yeah, a bigger headcount means more investment, means more profit, means more revenue. That changed. Yeah. So in the time of SaaS, AI, and other stuff, yeah, I mean, especially everything is online in these days. Yeah. You don't need a huge headcount to be a great or a really profitable business.
Yeah.