On keeping the team small
We get asked a lot: why not hire? Why not raise? Why not scale?
The honest answer is that “scale” isn’t a goal we have. We’d rather ship every app really well than ship twice as many badly. Every person you add to a team adds communication overhead — meetings, Slack threads, spec docs, design reviews. That overhead eats into the actual making of things.
Small teams move fast. Small teams own their decisions. Small teams can say no.
What small looks like in practice
Zydeno is remote-first and self-funded. There’s no office, no investor board and no growth target set by someone outside the work. Most coordination happens in writing: a short note on what’s being built, a shared checklist per release, a thread for each app. Calls happen when a decision genuinely needs a conversation, not because a calendar slot says so.
The person who builds a feature usually tests it, writes the release note and answers the first support emails about it. That sounds like a lot, and sometimes it is. But it means nobody ships something they’ll never hear about again, and feedback reaches the person who can act on it without passing through three handoffs.
It also means fewer layers between a decision and its consequences. When a store review flags a problem, the person reading it is usually one message away from the person who can fix it — and often is that person.
The trade-offs
Being small has real costs, and we’d be misleading you if we pretended otherwise. We release more slowly than a larger team could. Some good ideas wait a long time, or never get built. When one person is away, their app moves more slowly. And with apps on iPhone, Android, Windows and two browsers, there’s a constant pull to spread ourselves thinner than we should. We also can’t hand the unfamiliar parts to a specialist department; every new store’s rules, review process and quirks are something we learn ourselves.
We manage that by being strict about what we take on. A new platform for an existing app has to make the app genuinely better, not just more available. A new app has to be something we’d use ourselves and be willing to maintain for years. Most ideas don’t pass, and that’s the system working.
Why not raise
Outside money comes with outside expectations, and those expectations usually point toward growth at a pace that doesn’t suit careful work. Being self-funded means each app has to earn its keep, which is a useful constraint: it keeps us honest about what people actually value, rather than what looks good in a pitch.
What we got wrong
We’ve sometimes confused small with self-sufficient. Trying to do everything in-house — every translation check, every icon, every line of store copy — slowed us down in ways that weren’t worth it. Staying small doesn’t mean refusing help. We now bring in specialists for specific, well-defined work, like native-speaker review of translations, and keep the core team focused on building.
When we grow
Someday we’ll probably grow. When we do, it’ll be because a specific human can do a specific thing that makes the work better — not because investors want a bigger press release.