Publication Overview

Scaling a SaaS Company: Challenges, Lessons & What We’d Do Differently

Building and scaling a SaaS startup isn’t just about writing code—it’s about navigating growth bottlenecks, evolving infrastructure, and aligning teams to move fast without breaking things.

Challenge — Infrastructure Strain: As user traffic surged, so did load on our APIs, conversion engines, and queues. We hit performance ceilings earlier than expected and had to refactor on the fly.

Challenge — Onboarding & Retention: Getting users to sign up was easy. Keeping them engaged past day 3? Not so much. We had to rethink our activation flow and in-app education.

Challenge — Scaling Support: With a lean team, real-time support became overwhelming. We needed automation, documentation, and a way to prioritize high-intent users.

• Lesson #1 — Solve Before Scaling:

  We jumped into paid acquisition too early. Now we focus on retention first—because growth is pointless if users churn out.

• Lesson #2 — Automate Relentlessly:

  We built internal bots for monitoring, alerting, and customer feedback collection. It saved hours and helped us scale with a small team.

• Lesson #3 — Align Product with Metrics:

  We stopped shipping features that didn’t drive key metrics like activation and expansion. Every sprint ties to business goals now.

If We Did It Again: We’d start with fewer features, invest in observability from day one, and talk to customers before touching a single line of code. Hindsight is 20/20—but we’re stronger for the learnings.

Thanks for following along — more behind-the-scenes SaaS building stories coming soon 🚀