There are never enough developers.
The first hire doubles the team. It doesn’t double the output, and neither does any hire after it.
How it happens
The tech founder hires the first developer and goes from completely unscalable to mostly unscalable. The pair supports the first clients, builds MVP-plus features and gathers feedback, and they’re still swamped. So they hire again.
Somewhere around 10 to 15 developers, in Peter’s experience, productivity per developer peaks. Every year salaries, hosting and tooling cost more whether the team grows or not. Then the board pushes back, hiring stops, and the team becomes a target the moment the product matures.
Through all of it, support, maintenance, devops and security work grow faster than the team can.
“For every incremental gain in development capacity they get an exponential gain in communication, human resource, and bureaucratic overhead.”
What it costs
- Months to recruit and ramp each hire, and the management layer that comes with them.
- A budget that grows every year without the roadmap moving faster.
- A backlog that never shrinks, whatever the headcount.
What does keeping the lights on cost your team? Run your numbers →
What the bench does
- V1Triages and files every problem, so your developers start from the evidence, not a ticket.
- V2AI developers draft fixes and features as pull requests with tests and docs.
- V2Your developers, or your own AI agents, review and merge. Nothing ships without their approval.
V1 watches, triages and files the issues. V2 also drafts the fixes and features as pull requests. Compare the editions →