What I think drove our growth last year

So 2025 was weird. We grew revenue 10x. Went from 3 to 16 people, then back down to 8. Sent over 10 million emails. Helped our clients generate over $5M in sales and for the first time ever, I hit my money goals. And to say the truth, I'm still not totally sure why.

Like, I know what we did. But when I look back at what actually moved the needle, it wasn't the stuff I thought it would be. I spent a lot of time on things that didn't matter much, and barely thought about things that mattered a lot.

I've been trying to figure out what actually worked, and I think it comes down to a few things

Until a few months ago, we had zero marketing. No content, no ads, we didn't even do outbound for ourselves, which is kind of funny because that's what we sell. It was all referrals.

I used to think we'd grow by building better features or having better tech than competitors. I spent so much time on the product, on our AI, on infrastructure. And yeah, the product matters. But when I look at where our clients actually came from, it was other clients telling people about us.

That changed how I think about growth. The real lever wasn't marketing or even the product itself. It was making sure the clients we already had got results worth talking about. If they win, they tell people. If they don't, nothing else really matters. Kind of boring when I say it like that, but it's true.

So if getting results for clients was the main thing, the next question was how do we actually deliver at scale. And that's where I got stuck for a while. For months I was convinced we had a tech problem. We couldn't scale delivery fast enough and I thought we needed better infrastructure, better automations, a more sophisticated system. I was sure that if we just fixed the tech, everything else would fall into place.

I spent two months on this. I looked at everything - the tech, the processes, the people. Is it that no one's doing their tasks right? Is it that no one's doing them on time? Is it the database? Is it the automations? I attacked it from like five different angles because I couldn't figure out which one was actually broken.

Turns out it wasn't tech at all. It was project management. People weren't doing tasks on time because our system for tracking work was broken. We switched project management tools and the problem mostly went away.

I wasted a lot of time assuming the problem was technical when it was basically operational. And I think this happens to a lot of founders - you look for the complicated answer because it feels like it should be complicated. But sometimes the problem is just that people don't know what they're supposed to do today.

When I started Ken, I thought product was everything. I learned to code specifically to build it when I was 17. I didn't know how to code at all, but I had this pain point with manual outreach and I just wanted to solve it. So I learned enough to build an MVP in a couple weeks.

And for a while, product was everything. I spent all my time on features, infrastructure, AI improvements. I thought if I could just make the tech good enough, we'd win. But once we crossed a certain size, the bottleneck stopped being product and became people. We had good tech but we couldn't deliver because I didn't have the team to run it.

So I started spending way more time on communication. Adding video descriptions to tasks so people actually understood what they were supposed to do. Embedding our vision into the team so everyone knew why we were doing things a certain way. It sounds basic but it takes a lot of time when you're used to just building stuff yourself.

All the best business books stop talking about product at this stage and start talking about people, and I used to think that was kind of fluffy. Now I get it. I still don't have it fully figured out, but shifting my default from "let me build this" to "let me explain this" made a real difference.

One thing that saved us a lot of money this year was how we structured hiring. We hire a lot of contractors, and that's intentional. Some people came on to build specific things, finished, and left. One person got another opportunity and took it - can't really control that. And yeah, we had to let a few people go because their priorities didn't align with what we needed. That's why we went from 16 people down to 8.

I used to think hiring meant finding full-time people and keeping them forever. But a lot of the work we do doesn't need a 12-month commitment. If something takes three months to build, why would I budget for twelve months of salary? Contractors let us scale up when we need to and scale back down when we don't. It keeps costs flexible and means we're not paying for work that isn't happening.

I'm not saying this works for everyone. But for us, a smaller focused team is working better than a bigger scattered one.

The other thing that kept us lean was not having a product roadmap. I don't have one and never have. This sounds like a bad thing but I actually think it's why we move fast. Our roadmap is basically whatever clients ask for. If multiple clients request something, it gets prioritized and built. If the business needs something for efficiency, it gets built. Everything else gets ignored.

I know there's this idea that if you listen to customers you'd just build a faster horse or whatever. But I don't think that applies to us because our clients aren't consumers - they're B2B SaaS founders who are experts in sales and marketing. They know what they need. They're as smart as we are about this stuff. So we just listen.

What this means in practice is we never waste time on features no one uses. We're not guessing about what might be valuable. We just build what people actually ask for and it turns out that works pretty well.

I don't have a big strategy for 2026. I thought about making one but I'm honestly not sure what I'd put in it. This is the first year I ever actually hit my money goals. I gave a promise ring to my girlfriend. I traveled to 13 countries. I actually slept and ate well for once. The business grew 10x and I'm still kind of processing that.

I don't know what next year looks like. I just know I want to keep doing the stuff that got us here and stop doing the stuff that didn't.

Think about the three things that actually drove your growth last year. Not what you planned or what you spent the most time on, but what actually moved the numbers. If you're honest about it, you'll probably find one or two things that mattered way more than everything else. That's where your time should go this year.