Twelve people. Three founders. The math of saying no.
Staying small isn't a personality trait or a marketing position. It's a capacity calculation we redo every month. Here's the actual math behind why we turn down more work than we take.
The number
We are twelve people. Not twelve as a way station to forty — twelve as the answer. People assume that's a stage we're trying to grow out of. It isn't. It's the constraint that makes every other promise on this site keepable.
The math
Twelve people is roughly three projects running well at once, with slack for the one that goes sideways — and one always does. Take a fourth and the slack disappears. The first time something breaks, you're robbing one client's team to cover another's. Everyone's date slips a little. Nobody's told why.
So the real product isn't twelve engineers. It's the slack. The capacity we deliberately don't sell is what lets us answer the phone at 2am for the project that needs it.
What saying yes too often does
An overbooked studio doesn't fail loudly. It fails as a slow, even degradation: replies get slower, demos get thinner, the founders stop being in the channel because they're each in four other projects. Nobody gets fired. The work just quietly stops being good, and the clients can't quite point to when.
We've been the overbooked studio. The decision to stay small is mostly a decision never to be that again.
How we say no
In the first call, usually. If we're full, we say we're full and give you a date. If it's not our kind of work, we say so and name two people who'd do it better. A referral costs us nothing and means the next time you have a project that is ours, you remember who told you the truth.
The hardest no is to good work we have room for but shouldn't take — the project that's slightly outside what we're great at. Those are the ones that eat the slack. We've gotten better at turning them down. Most months we say no more than we say yes.
Why twelve
Because at twelve, the person who hears your brief is the person who writes your code, and the founders can still hold every project in their heads. Add a layer of management to coordinate more people and you've rebuilt the exact thing we left bigger shops to avoid. The math says twelve. So we stay twelve, and we say no.