For fast-growing startups, success can feel like a race—until the financials start slowing you down.
Lessons for growth-stage startups
For any startup in the scaling phase, there are three key takeaways from this story:
Tech alone won’t save you—your business model has to work.
If your costs grow faster than your revenue, no amount of engineering will fix it. Investing in cost-cutting features like ACH payments and revenue-generating features like search charges turned this company’s financials around.
Scaling engineering isn’t just about hiring—it’s about culture.
The company’s decision to embed experienced engineers across teams paid off. Their engineering team is now more self-sufficient, better trained, and able to scale sustainably.
Every engineering decision should be tied to business value & impact.
Whether it was reducing API response times, optimizing onboarding funnels, or restructuring payment flows, every improvement was directly connected to the company’s growth goals.
Growing sustainably is hard
Business model sustainability was the challenge for a funded, fast-growing company in a highly competitive industry. They had strong customer demand, but their financial model wasn’t sustainable.
Transaction costs were eating into margins, critical engineering bottlenecks were slowing them down, and the path to growth seemed frustratingly long.
To scale effectively, they needed more than just code. They needed an engineering organization that could grow with them, a roadmap to reduce operational costs, and a way to turn technology into a value driver of sustainability.
That’s where we came in.
Building the right features, the right way
Our team joined at a pivotal moment—when the company was poised for growth but facing mounting financial pressure. The immediate goal was clear: reduce costs, increase revenue, and get the company to cash flow break-even.
The first challenge was the cost of payments. The company was spending $3 million per month on credit card processing fees, an expense that threatened to spiral as the customer base expanded.
Our engineers implemented automated risk assessments to accelerate ACH adoption, allowing customers to switch to lower-cost bank payments and significantly reduce the risk of fraud. Within months, ACH transactions grew from 5.5% to 11%, cutting unnecessary expenses without disrupting customer experience.
At the same time, we introduced a new feature that transformed the company’s unit economics. This feature alone generated $1 million per month in additional revenue, helping push the company toward cash flow break even.
We also implemented credit card surcharges, ensuring that transaction costs weren’t shouldered entirely by the business. The impact was immediate—$130,000 in new revenue in the first week and set the company cash-flow positive for the first time in their history.
We weren’t just focused on writing code—we were focused on value—making every feature drive real business results. Every decision was about making the company more efficient and scalable. When you look at the changes we instituted, we positively changed the unit economics of the company leading to tens of millions of dollars in new revenue and saving a substantial incremental cost for every transaction.
These weren’t just technical wins—they were business-critical interventions that fundamentally changed how the company operated and led them towards their ultimate goal of cash-flow positivity.
Scaling engineering without scaling problems
Of course, fast-growing companies don’t just struggle with product development—they struggle with growing their engineering team without losing efficiency. That’s why our approach went beyond feature development.
Instead of concentrating our engineers in one area, the company’s leadership made a bold decision: spread them across teams to maximize influence. This ensured that best practices weren’t just implemented ad hoc—they became part of the company’s DNA, “critically involved in their own ways with product and platform.”
As a result, we weren’t just delivering features—we were helping the company scale sustainably. That meant:
- Training new engineers to get up to speed faster.
- Refining technical hiring and onboarding processes.
- Optimizing system performance to ensure growth didn’t come with reliability issues.
One of the biggest improvements came from cutting API response times in half, making the app faster and more efficient for customers. Small changes like these had a compounding effect—every improvement made the platform more scalable and the engineering team more effective.
The bottom line: a business that can scale sustainably
After months of targeted engineering investments, the company reached a major milestone: cash flow positive. By tackling inefficiencies in payments, pricing, and product adoption, they transformed their financial model while building an engineering organization capable of sustaining long-term growth.
We see this all the time—fast-growing startups have strong product-market fit, but their financials don’t yet support sustainable growth. It’s the age-old saying of “what got you here won’t get you there.” Growing companies need to evolve how they make engineering decisions and align with business outcomes or it will break the company. By embedding experienced engineers across teams, we helped this company ship the right features, optimize costs, and ultimately reach cash flow break even.
Many early-stage companies assume that scaling means hiring more engineers and building more features—but this company took a different approach. Instead of focusing on headcount, they focused on profitability, efficiency, and engineering culture. That decision made all the difference.
Final Thought: Scaling smarter, not just bigger
This company didn’t reach profitability by accident. They got there by aligning engineering with business outcomes, investing in the right improvements, and scaling their culture as intentionally as they scaled their product.
If your company is scaling rapidly and needs a trusted partner to drive product growth while avoiding technical pitfalls, let’s talk. We specialize in helping tech-driven companies scale the right way—without breaking their business.
Jonathon Baugh is a Senior Client Partner at Test Double and has experience helping enterprise leaders get to clarity, alignment, and actionable strategies.
