Slow growth is a strategy, not a consolation prize.

I won't pretend it was all intentional

Honest version first: our business was a tale of two stories — a period of high growth and a long period of low, flat growth — and neither was a deliberate strategy I cooked up in advance. Being bootstrapped forced a pace and a set of constraints on how, and how fast, we could grow. So I didn't choose slow growth off a whiteboard. What happened instead is that I lived through both modes and came out convinced that the steady, profitable one was the right thing — not the consolation prize the industry treats it as. This piece is the case I'd make in hindsight, earned rather than planned.

The 20 pizza shops: why "winner take all" is mostly a myth

The blitzscale narrative rests on a false premise — that there will be only one or two winners in a category, so you must get big fast or die. That's just not how most markets work. Picture any town in America: there are twenty pizza shops within a five-mile radius. Is there one winner? Are there seven? The reality is that most of those twenty are operating, generating reasonable incomes, with several doing very well and a few thriving. The market is bigger than you perceive, even when it's fiercely competitive.

SaaS is the same. When that VC told me Salesforce owned CRM, the unspoken assumption was that a market with a giant has no room for anyone else. But our small CRM kept acquiring customers and generating profits for two decades inside that "owned" market. Big competitive markets aren't winner-take-all death matches — they're crowded streets where many players make a good living and a slice get rich. "Get big fast or die" assumes a scarcity of winners that almost never actually exists.

Funded competitors haven't proven what you think they have

And the funded competitors who supposedly "won"? Honestly, it's hard to tell — and that's the point. Some won, some flamed out, some are dying a slow death inside a PE firm's portfolio. All of those outcomes are true at once. Here's the perspective I hold: a heavily funded company doesn't actually know whether it has a sustainable business until it stops spending on sales and marketing and sees whether real profits show up. Most of them never run that test. They raise, they spend, they grow the top line — and the fundamental question of whether the business works without the fuel pump running stays unanswered. A bootstrapped company answers that question every single month, by necessity. That's not a weakness. It's the only proof that counts.

The mechanics: constraint as a forcing function

Operating a deliberate-growth company is different day to day, and the difference is mostly discipline imposed by constraint. You can't just spend wildly on sales and marketing and hope for the best. You can't build endless features to "catch" the competition. The constraints are the forcing function — they make you choose. Which channels actually pay back. Which features earn their place. Which bugs to fix before which new thing gets built. A funded company can afford to skip those choices, and skipping them is exactly how products get bloated and go-to-market gets sloppy. Being unable to brute-force your way forward makes you decide what's actually worth doing — and those decisions compound in your favor.

Spiky growth is harder to manage than steady — much harder

Here's the counterintuitive truth that nobody planning to blitzscale wants to hear: spiky growth is harder to manage than slow and steady. When you have explosive growth, the organizational implications are real and they compound — you don't have enough salespeople, not enough success people to onboard everyone, more bugs, more feature requests, constant hiring. You never get a chance to catch up and right-size the organization in time. And then when that growth slows — and it always slows — you're over your skis, overstaffed and overbuilt, and now you have to downsize, which is its own nightmare.

Slow and steady wins precisely because it's more predictable, calmer, and more reassuring. You can right-size the team to the growth, onboard customers well, keep the bug count sane, and build the features that matter — because the pace lets you. The boom-bust company spends its life either drowning in growth it can't absorb or cutting back from growth that didn't last. The steady company just… operates. That predictability is a competitive advantage, not a lack of ambition.

The FOMO is real — ignore the shiny toys anyway

You'll always feel some FOMO. It's the disrespect again, inverted: funded peers get press for taking money to grow an unprofitable company, while you build something profitable and durable and get crickets. The way through is to stay focused on your own business — almost to pretend the competitors don't exist. That's very hard, because the temptation is constant: Competitor X built this feature, so it must be valuable to users. But you never actually know that. They have the money to build anything — who says they chose wisely? Who says your customers want or need it?

So ignore it. All of it. Focus on your own execution: what do our customers want, what problems should we solve, which bugs should I fix? Chasing competitors' shiny new toys is how a focused product becomes a confused one. The discipline of judging your business by your own numbers, not theirs, is the same discipline that keeps slow growth from quietly turning into reactive sprawl.

Who it's right for — and the misconception to kill

I'll be fair about the boundaries. There are genuine winner-take-all markets — AI foundation models, where Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are in an actual scale war, is a real example. If you're in a market with strong network effects or extreme economies of scale, blitzscaling may truly be necessary. But those markets are the exception, not the rule. For most SaaS businesses — and especially bootstrapped ones — deliberate growth is the right call.

The biggest misconception, the one I'd most want to correct, is that high growth is the only way to build a successful business. It isn't. Building a slower-growth, profitable business is the right move for most SaaS companies, full stop. The industry has convinced a generation of founders that anything short of hypergrowth is failure — and that belief has killed more good, fundable, profitable businesses than slow growth ever did. Slow growth isn't the path you take because you couldn't do the real thing. For most of us, it is the real thing.