The goal is to scale your startup's revenues and customer base without proportionally increasing headcount and spending.

As a startup grows, the focus shifts from just acquiring users to ensuring sustainable growth and revenue. We learned the hard way that even if users love our product, we must also pay attention to our overall growth metrics to avoid becoming a beloved startup that fails due to lack of financial viability.

As you hire more people, your expenses will increase beyond just salaries, so it's important to anticipate these changes. An employee's total cost to a startup can be 25% to 50% more than their salary, so if you pay an engineer $100,000, the fully loaded cost could be between $125,000 and $150,000.

Be aware of your company's growth rate and how much you're spending versus your revenue.

Startups that rapidly scale to eight figures in revenue often do so with very small teams, demonstrating that fewer employees can still drive significant growth.

Companies are now achieving significant revenue growth with fewer employees, moving away from the traditional metric of hiring more staff as a sign of success.

Managing growth effectively is crucial for a startup's success, as it can determine whether the company thrives or fails.

Founders often believe that having more employees impresses investors and customers, which can lead to focusing on hiring as a key performance indicator.

Track the number of paying customers to measure growth; increasing customer acquisition rates can demonstrate to investors how quickly you're scaling.