Companies like Basecamp, Instagram, and WhatsApp achieved great impact with teams of less than 50 people. Those are the kind of teams that we are passionate about at Happy Scribe — small groups that achieve high impact through smart architecture decisions and high talent density. All the principles below are set in place to achieve this overarching goal.
We win by learning, and we learn by shipping. The faster we ship, the faster we win.
Do the simple implementation first. Then get real world feedback, and if it needs more complexity it can be added later on.
Be a Duct-tape programmer. Bootstrap is everything.
We trust you with sharp knives. You decide if your change requires a review or not, you can push straight to production, and you have full access to all our systems.
Trusting our team reduces overhead and increases individual responsibility and agency. You are free to move fast and break things, and we trust you will take responsibility and clean after yourself.
This doesn't mean you have to use all the sharp knives, all the time. We also trust that you'll know when is not a good time to use them.
Mastering Risk and Reversibility
Do one thing at a time, not two. And make sure it is the most important thing you can do.
Treasure and protect your focus and everyone else's by communicating asynchronously most of the time and making sure you can work as independently as possible.
Read: Deep Work (book in our library)
Building Happy Scribe is a marathon, not a sprint. A clean and thoughtful architecture multiplies our speed and impact. This is one of the key reasons we've been able to have so much impact with so little people.
Write code that does not slow anyone down and brings joy to everyone who reads it.
Quick Read: Coding Guidelines from Wave Long Read: Clean Code (book in our library)