Grow, when it's time to grow

On 1st of March 2021 and after about three years, Beyond Code grows from a Company of One to a team of three!

When Marcel and I founded Beyond Code, we were in love with Paul Jarvis Company of One strategy. A Company of One is a company where only the founders work and that is not obsessed with growth – particularly with employing other people. It's not a manifesto against business success or growth in general, but it makes sure that hiring is not a top priority as this increases responsibilities and reduces the freedom of the owners.

Beyond Code was started as a web development consultancy but our goal was to build developer tools and run a developer tools company for our living. With the launch of Invoker, we finally hit a revenue level that allows us to work on the tools that you all love full-time. In fact, we surpassed this level and are able to bring someone else to the team, too.

Why do we become a team and leave the comfortable state of a Company of One?

Over the last three years, we have launched multiple products and we still have ideas for new ones. These applications are used by thousands of developers daily and this comes with its' own responsibilities, too. Running a company with thousands of customers is a dream spot to be in – but our desktop applications require constant maintenance and improvements to stay as essential as they are today. The licensing model for them also forces us to keep working on all applications and add more value to them so that our customers renew their license every year and not keep using an older version for free. This is by design and the only way of running a business with the customer at the center of all decisions. If our software becomes obsolete, we go out of business.

So to be able to take new challenges and create more tools, we need to keep an eye of our current product portfolio, too. Otherwise, we don't have the time to crush that nasty HELO bug that we postpone for over a year or finally add the convenience features to Tinkerwell and Invoker that we wanted to build forever. We've build systems to automate as much as we can and brought in a team of brilliant freelancers to support us on the things that they can do much better than we ever could – but this is not enough. There are so many things that we want to do and time is limited by physics.

Sometimes it's hard to reflect on a situation like this, especially if you build your company around a specific mindset and try to make it work as a Company of One. But sometimes, it suddenly becomes easy: You come across someone that you want to hire, just because you think that this is an awesome fit for your team – directly after you realize that your cash flow is not at risk with this new team member.

This is why Beyond Code will be a team of three on 1st of March. We'll announce who's joining our team, help us building more developers tools for you and do some awesome community work in early March.

Comments

Leave a comment at my Tweet or give it a ❤️ if you like the post.