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- 💪 Lean teams =/= skimpy results
💪 Lean teams =/= skimpy results
Less is more—unless you’re talking about revenue per employee.
Simon Litt
January 21, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
The Progress Report | January 21, 2025
Startups are called “innovative” when they do something new. Novel. Exciting. They don't just break the rules—they throw the book out entirely.
Today’s about challenging outdated business advice and getting you to bet on yourself.
WEEKLY INSIGHT
Starting and growing a business used to have a pretty clear playbook: secure hefty funding, hire a large team and scale operations through sheer manpower. Revenue per employee wasn’t all that important.
But today, companies are proving that remarkable success doesn’t require bloated teams. Take WhatsApp, for example. When the messaging platform was acquired by Facebook in 2014 (for a cool $19 billion), it had just 55 employees serving 450 million users. If they were able to do that 11 years ago, think about what you can do in the “age of AI” with a small, tech-fluent team.
Revenue growth doesn’t require team growth. It requires focus, simplicity and the ability to scale.
Don’t hire. Really. Don’t hire people. Look for another way. Is the work that’s burdening you really necessary? What if you just don’t do it? Can you solve the problem with a slice of software or a change of practice instead?
INTENT TO ACTION
Rather than hiring people internally, get freelancers for specific jobs. If onboarding them sounds time-consuming, there’s a solution: clone yourself. (Or, at least, your brain.)
First, you’ll want to record what you know in a “knowledge base”—a fancy term for a library of reusable resources, templates and best practices. Notion and Slite are two good places to build this, but you can use ol’ reliable—Google Drive—if you want to keep things simple.
Pick one recurring task you’ve decided to outsource.
Document the process step-by-step.
Upload it to your knowledge base.
Connect the base with NotebookLM.
Voilà. Meet your work brain’s clone.
NotebookLM uses your knowledge base + AI fanciness to answer procedural questions. Rather than freelancers coming to you for answers, they can simply type, “What’s the process for [X]?” or “Where is [Y] template?” into the system and get a clear, detailed response.
Scaling your business doesn’t mean scaling your team. By staying lean and leveraging the right strategies, your small team can keep agile and make a big impact.
Next week, we’ll explore how to effectively document tasks on your quest to automate busywork.
See you then.
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