Every year or so someone asks why we have not grown. It is a fair question — the demand is there, and the obvious move for a studio with a full pipeline is to hire against it.
We have not, and the reason is narrower than it sounds.
The thing we are protecting
The work we are good at requires the person designing a system to also be the person who has to live inside it six months later. That feedback loop is what stops a design system from becoming a beautiful artefact nobody can extend, and it is the first casualty of a handoff-shaped organisation.
Above a certain size, handoffs become structurally necessary. You cannot have everyone in the room, so you write the decision down instead, and the written version is always thinner than the reasoning behind it. That thinning is invisible for about a year.
What small actually costs
Two things, and we have never solved either.
We turn down work we would be good at. Not occasionally — regularly. There is no version of this where a small team says yes to everything, and pretending otherwise just moves the problem into the schedule.
We are fragile to absence. A team of four has no bench. Illness, leave, and the ordinary shape of a life all land harder here than they would somewhere with redundancy, and the only honest mitigation is scheduling slack that a bigger studio would spend on throughput.
If a studio tells you being small has no downside, they are describing a pitch rather than a practice.
What we would tell someone considering it
Decide what the constraint is protecting before you adopt it. Small is not a virtue on its own — it is a trade that buys a specific kind of coherence, and it is only worth making if that coherence is what your clients are actually paying for.
For us it is. Nine years of the same four people arguing about the same codebase turns out to be a real asset, and it is not one you can hire for.
