The MVP's shortcuts start to cost you
What was fine at 100 users starts breaking, slowing down, or getting expensive at 10,000.
- Then
- Fine at 100 users
- Now
- Breaking, slow or expensive at 10,000
IndustriesScale-ups
What worked at 1x breaks at 10x. We rebuild it while it runs.
The code and shortcuts that got you to product-market fit are rarely the same ones that get you through the next 10x - scaling is its own separate problem. We find the parts that are cracking and replace them one at a time, while the product keeps shipping.
What breaks at 10x
Growth rarely breaks everything at once. It finds the few shortcuts that were fine at launch and leans on them until they give.
ComponentSymptomWhat we do
01
Database
Symptom: Pages slow down at peak and the database CPU sits near its ceiling.
What we do: Find the queries doing the damage, add the right indexes and caching, and move heavy work off the request path.
Cloud & DevOps02
Deploys
Symptom: A release takes most of an afternoon, so the team batches changes and ships less often.
What we do: A CI/CD pipeline with checks on every change, small releases and a one-step rollback.
Cloud & DevOps03
Onboarding engineers
Symptom: New hires take weeks to ship, and only one person understands billing.
What we do: An architecture review, then the risky areas mapped, written down and handed to more than one owner.
Tech consulting04
The monolith
Symptom: Every change touches everything, and a bug in one feature takes the rest down with it.
What we do: Pull out the parts that need real architecture one at a time, behind the running product - no ground-up rewrite.
Digital transformation05
Reporting
Symptom: Dashboards query the production database and slow the app for customers.
What we do: A data pipeline that feeds reports from their own store, away from live traffic.
Data & analyticsWhy it gets harder, not just bigger
Hiring can't be the only fix
Adding engineers to an unclear codebase slows a team down before it speeds one up.
- Then
- One more engineer, more output
- Now
- Each new hire slows an unclear codebase first
Uptime becomes non-negotiable
Downtime that was forgivable pre-launch now costs real customers and real revenue.
- Then
- Downtime was forgivable pre-launch
- Now
- Downtime costs customers and revenue
How we help
The infrastructure, the architecture and the people watching it - the three things that have to grow with the product.
01
Infrastructure that scales with you
Cloud architecture and DevOps practices built for the traffic you're growing into.
02
A platform, not a patch
Rebuilding the parts of the product that need real architecture, without a ground-up rewrite.
03
Ongoing hands on the wheel
Continuous monitoring and support so growth doesn't outpace who's watching the system.
Growing faster than your system?
Tell us what is slowing down or breaking first - we come back with what we would rebuild, in what order, without a feature freeze.