Five years in, with a team you could fit around one table

I realized only recently that we'd quietly passed our five-year mark.

It came and went while we were heads down on other things. Figured that was worth writing about more than another post on why direct mail works.

Five years ago, this company was an idea we were kicking around during the early days of the pandemic. There wasn't really a grand plan. We saw a problem worth trying to solve, so we started building.

I still don't have a tidy version of how we got from there to here. We started out building AI models to help brands figure out which advertising channels to put their spend behind. That turned into a recommendation engine using a brand's own customer data to determine which products should be front and center in their emails and ads. Eventually, that led us to direct mail. Not where I expected to end up when we started.

We've raised capital, opened an office, launched products, changed direction more than once, and worked with companies I wouldn't have imagined working with five years ago.

Through all of it, the team has stayed at around 10 people. That's been deliberate. We've never viewed headcount as something to optimize for.

We do considerably more with the same number of people today than we did a few years ago, and AI has accelerated that further, giving a small team the ability to test, build, and iterate at a pace that wasn't possible when we started.

Five years in, building a company feels pretty different from what I assumed it would. Most of it isn't glamorous. Talk to customers. Fix problems. Make decisions without always having all the information. Change your mind when the data tells you to. Try things that don't work. Keep the things that do.

Do that consistently for long enough and things start to compound.

We've gone from mailing our first few hundred postcards to sending millions of pieces a year, still with a team you could fit around one table.

That's the kind of scale I care about. Not more people, but what a small team is capable of doing.

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