A founder shares how they scaled to a $100M exit by tracking expenses obsessively, using customer feedback votes to prioritize fixes, and measuring whether solving grouped problems actually moved the needle. They freed engineering time by diagnosing where it went and made ruthless roadmap trade-offs to enter new markets.
There were certain points where we would look at our. We would look at our expenses, and we'd say, look, we're driving up our fixed expenses. We need to find a way in order to cut this at this point, or a variable expenses. And we basically look at this and say, where are we spending the most amount of time? Why is our engineering team spending so much time on bugs and whatever it may be, rather than building new products, we drill down. We'd say, what is the root cause of certain problems that are spending those times? And we'd look through those ones, and we'd see how many items were related to each other. And we'd say, okay, if we solve these three problems, you know, 20% of these go away immediately, and it frees up this much time. But was a big one we had. The other one was we would go and look at our. We were using candy at the time. So we were looking at a software that could, like, let customers throw feedback to us. And we'd say, what are the most people voting on that they want? We said, okay, we want to focus on customer satisfaction, especially if we were trying to drive referrals. So what we would do is we go find some of the clients that were complaining the most about certain things, and we go and we'd fix specifically their problems, and then we could drive a referral. Hey, listen, we want to show you that we're active, we're proactive. Can you write us a review? And those kind of things would work. Strategic ones would be, you know, that's the future development. Like, we really want to get into this market over here. These are the five things that we really need to do. Are we willing to sacrifice this other point in order to be able to make sure that we can enter that area? And then we would drive it over there. So again, it changed regularly. And that was actually, again, one of our benefits that we could change so easily and adjust our entire roadmap as needed.
