The team should be so small that it's uncomfortable
Jul 10, 2026
There’s a common mistake in startups: hiring people a bit earlier than you actually need to.
It seems logical: there’s a lot of work, everyone’s overloaded, you need to plug the gaps, speed up, add management, more features, more parallelism.
But in practice almost always the opposite happens. The team gets bigger and the speed drops.
Why?
Because a small team forces clarity.
When there are few of you, you can’t run ten directions at once. You can’t hide a bad product behind processes. You can’t spend months discussing the roadmap. You can’t keep people who are “sort of useful”. Everything is visible immediately.
A small team forces you to answer uncomfortable questions:
- what’s the most important thing right now?
- who is actually moving the product forward?
- what work can we simply not do at all?
- which feature isn’t worth a dedicated person?
- where are we trying to cure a lack of focus with hiring?
A big team often gives a feeling of progress. More people, more meetings, more status updates, more of everything going on.
But that can be just organizational noise.
I’d say a good early-stage team should be so small that it’s a little scary. So that it constantly feels like “we don’t have enough people”.
That’s a normal feeling. It keeps the system sharp.
Being short on people is also unpleasant because it forces you to deal with the most tedious stuff.
Not what’s easy to show in a demo. Not the small features that give a sense of motion. But the big fundamental things: understanding the real problem, simplifying the product, fixing the core flow, removing the excess, making it so the user comes back on their own.
When there are a lot of people, it’s very easy to hide unimportant features behind busy people.
Everyone has a task. Everyone has progress. Everyone has something to show at the sync. And gradually the team starts serving its own busyness instead of the main risk of the business.
A small team doesn’t allow that. If there are few of you, you can’t keep a person on a feature that’s “sort of useful”. Too expensive. You have to keep coming back to the boring question: which of this actually moves the company?
If the team is too comfortable, most likely you’ve already started buying comfort at the cost of speed. And in a startup comfort is almost always expensive.
Not because people aren’t needed. They are.
But every new person has to add more speed than complexity. And that’s a very high bar.
So the best question before hiring isn’t “do we have work for them?”.
There’s always work.
The best question is: “if we don’t hire this person, what will we stop doing?”
If the answer is “nothing, we’ll just be a bit less loaded”, I wouldn’t hire.
If the answer is “we’ll stop doing the secondary stuff and finally get to what matters”, all the more so.
A small team isn’t garage romance. It’s a forcing function. It makes you choose, cut the excess, and do only what really matters.
Originally posted in Russian on my telegram. This is a translation.