The fastest way to ruin a small studio is to hire fast. We've watched it happen. We talk to founders six months out from a hot quarter who suddenly have five new people, half a million more in burn, and a culture that doesn't quite remember itself in the hallway.
We've stayed small on purpose. Not as a constraint — as a strategy. Every additional person on a small team adds capacity, but they also add coordination cost, context overhead, and the slow tax of needing to write down things that used to live in someone's head.
We hire when one of two things is true. Either we're consistently turning down work we'd otherwise want to take, for several quarters in a row. Or we have a specific gap that the existing team genuinely can't cover, and won't be able to without a full-time person owning it. Anything less than that, and we don't open the role.
When we do hire, we look past the CV pretty quickly. Skills can be taught. The four traits that filter past everything else are these.
Curiosity. The kind of person who reads the docs all the way to the end, who tries the weird edge case, who follows the thread one more turn after everyone else has stopped.
Craft. Pride in how something is made — not just whether it ships. Names of variables. Files left tidier than they were found. PR descriptions that respect the reviewer's time.
Communication. Writes a clear sentence. Disagrees without escalating. Raises problems early, with a proposal attached. Knows when to ask, when to decide, and when to surface.
Care. Thinks about the person on the other end of the screen. The owner trying to read their cashflow at 11 PM. The new user trying to log in for the first time. The work is for them, not for the resume.
If a candidate has all four, we'll teach them the stack. If they're missing one of them, we don't hire — no matter how impressive the rest of the resume is.
Slow hiring is the opposite of glamorous. It looks like nothing happening. It feels like under-investing while the work piles up. It pays off invisibly, on the Tuesday afternoon a year later when the team feels light, the room is calm, and the project everyone agreed to deliver is on time.
Growing right beats growing fast. Every time.