Fuck scale.

You have 40 users, no idea how many of them will pay, and an infrastructure plan for a million. You have spent more time preparing for imaginary traffic than figuring out whether the people already using your product find it worth paying for.

What exactly are you trying to grow?

If every new customer costs you more than they pay, you are growing a loss. If the business only survives because you work for free, you are growing a job you cannot afford to have. A bigger number on the dashboard will not pay the bills for you.

I want more builders to go for sustainability. Build something customers value enough to pay for. Charge enough to deliver it properly, pay the people doing the work, including yourself, and leave money in the business. Give yourself room to survive a bad month without turning it into an emergency fundraising campaign.

Go for profit from day one. You can decide how big to make the business while you are building one that actually works.

Go for profit from day one

Go for profit from day one. Make it part of how you choose the product, set the price and decide what you can afford to spend. Do not build an entire business around free usage and leave the question of how it pays for itself to a future version of you.

Before you add another feature, ask who will pay for it and what it will cost to deliver. Charge early enough to learn whether people value the thing. Work out how many paying customers you need to cover the full cost of running it, including paying yourself, with something left over. Then test those assumptions against what customers actually do.

You may spend money building before the first sale. You may need time to recover that investment. Give that period a budget and a limit. Know what needs to become true for the business to turn a profit, and how long you can afford to find out.

Going for profit from day one is a direction for your decisions. Nobody can promise that the first day will end in profit. But you can decide from the first day that earning more than you spend matters, and stop treating it as a problem you will solve after you get big.

More customers can make the problem worse

Imagine a software product charging ₦10,000 per customer each month. These are hypothetical numbers, but stay with me.

You have 100 paying customers. That gives you ₦1 million in monthly revenue.

Suppose the payment fees, API usage and direct delivery costs come to ₦12,000 per customer. You spend ₦1.2 million delivering what you collected ₦1 million to provide. You are already ₦200,000 behind, before paying for anything else.

Now someone tells you to scale.

At 1,000 customers, assuming the same price and cost per customer, you collect ₦10 million and spend ₦12 million delivering the service. The hole is now ₦2 million a month. Congratulations on the growth.

Yes, some costs fall as volume increases. You might negotiate a better rate, automate expensive work or spread fixed costs across more customers. Those are real possibilities. Put numbers against them. Know which cost will fall, by how much, and at what volume.

“Once we scale” cannot carry the whole explanation.

If each additional customer costs more to serve than they pay you, finding more of them accelerates the problem. You need to change the price, the product, the cost of delivery or the customers you are serving. Sometimes you need to change several of those things.

That work is less flattering than posting a growth chart. Do it anyway.

Revenue still has bills to pay

Even when each customer pays more than they cost to serve directly, you still have a business to run.

Take another hypothetical example. A small product has 100 customers paying ₦20,000 a month. Revenue is ₦2 million. Direct delivery costs are ₦400,000. That leaves ₦1.6 million to cover salaries, the founder’s pay, marketing, software, accounting and everything else.

If those expenses come to ₦1.4 million, you have ₦200,000 left before tax. A 10% pre-tax margin under those assumptions. Useful. Also quite different from “I run a ₦2 million-a-month business” if the listener imagines most of that money belongs to you.

You can see the distinction in an actual company’s reporting. Buffer reported $18.6 million in revenue for 2024 and net profit of $202,459, following losses in 2022 and 2023. That is a net margin of roughly 1.1%. A substantial business, with a much smaller amount remaining after expenses than the revenue figure alone suggests. Buffer’s December 2024 shareholder update.

I appreciate that they publish both numbers. Builders need to see both.

Then there is cash. A customer can owe you money that appears in your revenue while your bank account is still waiting for payment. An annual subscription can put cash in your account today while leaving you responsible for another twelve months of service. Buying equipment can take cash out immediately even when the accounting expense is spread over time.

You need to know what you earned, what it cost you and what money is actually available when bills fall due.

A revenue screenshot cannot answer all three.

Count the work you are doing for free

There is another way to make a struggling business look healthy: leave yourself out of the costs.

You do the development. You answer support messages at midnight. You write the marketing, onboard every customer and fix every broken integration. The spreadsheet shows a profit because the person doing most of the work apparently requires no money and no sleep.

Founders do unpaid work in the beginning. That is normal. You are investing your time because you want to find out whether something can work.

But keep track of that investment. Know what the business would need to earn to pay you. If it only works while you work for free indefinitely, you have another problem to solve.

The same applies to your capacity. A profitable service that requires you to personally rescue every customer every week might be worth running. It might even be a good business for a while. You still need to understand what happens when you get sick, take a break or accept ten more customers.

Sustainability includes being able to keep your promises without quietly destroying the person making them.

Spend according to the business you actually have

I have written about the cost of infrastructure because it is one place developers can make this problem unnecessarily expensive.

You can explain every service in your stack individually. The database saves time. The authentication service saves time. The hosting platform saves time. Then you add everything up and discover that your product needs several paying customers just to cover the tools you chose before speaking to one.

Sometimes that spending is justified. A managed service can save enough engineering work to be the cheaper choice overall. Running everything yourself also has costs: maintenance, backups, security, incidents and your attention. Count those too.

But do the calculation for your business.

In October 2024, David Heinemeier Hansson reported that 37signals had reduced its annual cloud bill run rate from $3.2 million to $1.3 million after moving applications onto owned hardware. He put the hardware expenditure at about $700,000. He also explained that the company had existing data-centre capacity and a dedicated operations team. His account of the cloud exit includes those details for a reason.

A solo founder should not read that and order a rack of servers. The useful part is that a company examined a major expense and changed how it operated when the numbers justified it.

You can do that at your size. Review the subscriptions. Check what happens when the free credits expire. Understand the bill if usage doubles. If customers pay you in naira and suppliers charge you in dollars, leave room for an exchange-rate movement rather than assuming today’s margin will remain intact.

Spend on the things that help you deliver value reliably and reach people who will pay. You do not need an expensive stack to prove that you are building something serious.

A smaller audience can still support a real business

Before asking how to reach everyone, work out who you can serve well enough to sustain the work.

This is why I keep coming back to the minimum viable audience. A product for a specific group can be easier to explain, easier to improve and easier for the right customer to recommend.

“Software for businesses” gives you an enormous market on a slide. It does very little to tell you what to build on Monday.

A tool for a particular kind of business, handling a recurring problem you understand, gives you somewhere to begin. You can find those people. Learn how they work. Find out what they already spend. See whether your product earns a place in their routine.

You might discover that a few hundred customers can support the business you want. You might discover that your pricing requires thousands, or that serving this audience costs more than you expected. Better to find that out now.

And charge for what you provide. I have already written about putting a price on my work. You cannot learn much about the economics of a paid product if you keep postponing the part where someone has to pay.

Watch what happens afterwards, too. Do they use it? Do they renew? Are you keeping customers, or continually spending money to replace people who leave?

The encouragement around a launch can feel good. A customer returning because the product is useful gives you something firmer to build on.

You can still want to build something big

I am not asking you to abandon ambition. Grow. Hire people. Enter another market when you understand what doing so requires.

Some businesses need significant investment before they can earn a profit. Some opportunities are worth taking before every part of the operation is settled. The important thing is knowing what you are financing, what evidence supports the decision and how much room you have if your assumptions are wrong.

Funding and profitability can also exist together. In Moniepoint’s October 2024 announcement of its $110 million Series C, founder Tosin Eniolorunda said the company was operating profitably and would use the capital to accelerate expansion across Africa. That is the founder’s account, rather than a detailed set of audited results, but the stated ambition included both growth and profitability. Moniepoint’s funding announcement.

You do not have to choose a small business as a moral position. You also do not have to turn every useful product into a venture-scale company.

Choose deliberately. If you take investment that comes with expectations of rapid expansion and a large exit, understand the business you have agreed to build. If you want a profitable company that gives you independence and serves a particular audience well, take that goal seriously too.

There is a lot of room between a side project and a unicorn. A company can serve a town, an industry or a few thousand customers for years. It can employ people, pay its suppliers and make something work better for the people who depend on it. It can grow steadily without needing to become the largest business in its category.

Think about a small team maintaining software that local clinics use to manage appointments, or a company helping distributors keep track of stock. These are hypothetical businesses, but the usefulness is easy to understand. Patients get booked. Deliveries get recorded. People spend less of their day chasing information. None of those benefits requires a billion-dollar valuation.

That middle deserves more respect. A business serving its customers reliably and providing decent jobs is doing something valuable, even if it never appears on a list of fast-growing startups. Its customers still need it on Tuesday, long after the launch attention has moved elsewhere.

Paying yourself, employing people properly and doing valuable work for customers is a worthwhile outcome. You do not owe anyone a unicorn.

Make the business worth growing

Before the next feature sprint or marketing campaign, sit with the numbers.

What does an additional customer pay you, and what does serving them cost? How much do you spend acquiring customers? How long do they actually stay? What must the business earn to cover its full expenses, including reasonable pay for you?

Then look at cash. When will customers pay? When do your bills fall due? How much room do you have if sales slow down or a large customer leaves?

You do not need a beautiful dashboard to begin. A spreadsheet and honest answers will do more for you than another argument about which stack scales better.

Fix the expensive part of delivery. Make the offer clearer. Improve the experience that causes customers to leave. Charge a price that gives the business room to operate. Build enough breathing room to make the next decision carefully.

Then, when you grow, you will have a clearer idea of what you are growing and why it should survive.

Fuck scaling. Go for sustainability in your business.

Build something that earns its place in your customers’ lives and pays for the work required to keep it there. You can decide how big it should become from that position.