How We Built a $5M ARR SaaS with a Team of 5 (and 50% Profit Margins)
Most founders think scale means headcount.
We proved it doesn’t.
Groove hit $5 million ARR with five people. No sales team. No funding. Just a product that solved a real problem, a lean stack, and systems that did the heavy lifting.
This is how we did it. And why we’d do it the same way again.
Build For One (Not None)
We didn’t build Groove for everyone. We built it for us.
The idea came out of frustration. Back at BantamLive, our support tools were clunky, slow, and overbuilt. We didn’t need 100 features. We needed speed, clarity, and a way to actually help our users.
So in 2011, I put in $50,000 of my own money and built the help desk I wished we had.
We launched the beta. 1,000 signups in 7 days. Why? Because we were solving a problem shared by a lot of other lean SaaS teams. Small teams doing high-volume support with no time to waste.
We doubled down.
No enterprise roadmap. No feature bloat. Just simple, powerful support features built for companies like ours.
Keep it simple (stay focused)
Every feature creates questions, complexity, and non-linear potential errors.
So we built Groove to be dead simple.
We didn’t add dashboards for the sake of dashboards. We didn’t build team-based routing until it was painfully obvious we needed it. We ignored feature requests that served edge cases instead of our core user.
If something wasn’t being asked for by at least 25% of our paying customers, it didn’t make the cut.
Early on, we deleted more features than we shipped.
The result?
Support ticket volume stayed flat while revenue grew.
Simplicity wasn’t a philosophy. It was a growth strategy.
Show your work
We didn’t have a marketing team.
So in 2013, I started writing.
The Startup Journey blog wasn’t a strategy. It was a survival move. We didn’t have money to spend on ads. We didn’t have a sales team dialing for demos. What we had was the truth—about what it actually looked like to build a SaaS company from the ground up.
So I shared it.
Revenue numbers. Growth plateaus. Team mistakes. Customer wins. Every week, we published the real story.
And it worked.
Founders started reading. Investors subscribed. People shared it. Within months, the blog was our number one acquisition channel.
It turns out that when you tell the truth—and back it with proof—people pay attention.
We didn’t build a brand with PR.
We built it by showing our work.
Make support a team activity
Everyone answered tickets—including me.
When an issue came in, the person best equipped to solve it owned it. If it was a bug, an engineer jumped in. If it was a usage issue, we fixed the UX or added a tooltip. If a question came up more than once, we wrote a doc.
Support wasn’t a department. It was a feedback loop.
This kept us close to the customer. It kept our roadmap grounded in reality. And it kept our team sharp—because when you have to answer for the product you build, you build it better.
We didn’t need a five-person support org.
We needed five people who gave a shit.
That’s what we had.
Product-Led from the start
We never had a sales team.
Users signed up, onboarded themselves, and started seeing value in minutes. If they had a question, we answered fast. That alone closed deals.
Everything was built for speed:
- Free trial, no credit card
- Dead-simple onboarding
- Minimal setup
- Clear value by Day 1
Support was our sales strategy. The product was our demo.
And it worked.
We crossed $5M ARR without running a single outbound campaign. No cold emails. No SDRs. No AEs. Just PLG at full throttle.
Today, we’ve evolved.
We now use AI-powered outbound to get the right people into the funnel faster—but we still don’t have a dedicated sales team.
Our team supports and assists, but we close with product.
Spend like it's your money (because it is)
Ultimately, the way we got to 50% profit margins by being ruthless with expenses.
We bootstrapped Groove from day one. That meant every dollar mattered. And every dollar was ours.
We didn’t hire early. We didn’t chase headcount. We didn’t spend on tools that didn’t directly save us time or make us money.
- We used Groove to run Groove.
- We tracked every recurring expense.
- We ran lean infrastructure.
- We built internal tools when it saved us more than it cost to maintain (or we just scrapped the need for them entirely if the payoff wasn't immediately evident)
This discipline added up.
While most startups bragged about top-line revenue (and millions in annual burn rate), we quietly built a machine with 50% EBITDA.
Profit wasn’t a byproduct. It was the goal.
You Don’t Need a Big Team. You Need the Right One.
Groove hit $5 million ARR with five people.
No funding. No sales team. No bloat.
We built a simple product that solved a painful problem. We stayed close to our customers. We shared everything. We automated what we could. We said no—constantly. And we ran the business like it was ours, because it was.
That’s how we got to $5M ARR with 50 percent profit margins.
Not by scaling chaos.
By scaling discipline.
You don’t need 50 people to build a successful SaaS company.
You need five who care enough to do it right.
