Big Businesses Built with Tiny Teams

Here are a few of my favorites tiny teams that have built big businesses:

• Craigslist has 50 employees generating $1 billion a year

• Instagram was acquired by Facebook with 13 employees for $1 billion

• WhatsApp also acquired by Facebook for $19 billion with only 55 employees

• BuiltWith has one single employee, yet generates $14 million a year

• Mojang (co behind Minecraft) was acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion with just 37 employees
  

How do these tiny teams build big businesses?

The beauty of a tiny team is that with deliberate focus it can move faster while staying nimble.

Just like a boat, the fewer people onboard, the faster it will move through the water to reach its destination. It’s easier for everyone to be rowing in the same direction with a tiny team. You can change the direction of where the boat is headed quickly when needed.

Tiny teams leverage software, tech, and automation to scale themselves quickly.

They ruthlessly cut out what they don't need to be working on.

For example, we might have a list of things to get done this quarter. Our goal might be to increase revenue by adding in 1000 new customers in Texas.

We will revisit that list of things to do weekly to ask ourselves: Is this going to increase our revenue? Will it bring us new customers in Texas? If not, we'll cut it. We can work on it later or never.

Tiny teams are not starving teams. Most are well funded by customers or VC’s - and quite profitable.