Fyxer 5x'd Revenue in 3 Months and Nearly Lost Their Customers

The Mistake

Founders obsess over what happens if things don't work. What if the campaign flops? What if the product launch falls flat? What if nobody signs up?

Almost nobody plans for the opposite problem: what happens if this actually works?

Richard Hollingsworth learned this the hard way when Fyxer AI grew from $1M to $5M ARR in three months. The growth was exactly what they wanted. The infrastructure behind it was not even close to ready.

Why Founders Make It

Survival bias. Most startup experience is about things not working. You spend months or years grinding through failed experiments. Your instinct is to plan for another miss, not a hit.

Resource scarcity thinking. When you're a small team with limited cash, every dollar goes toward making something work. Spending money preparing for success that hasn't happened yet feels wasteful. Why hire a third support person when you only have two support tickets a day?

Gradual growth assumption. Founders assume growth will be linear enough that they'll have time to react. You'll go from 100 to 200 to 500 customers and hire along the way. But when marketing and product click at the same time, you can 5x overnight. There's no gradual ramp.

How Fyxer Nearly Lost Its Customers

At the beginning of the year, Fyxer had a team of four and was doing about $1M ARR. They'd just raised a Series A and started marketing the product for the first time. Before that, everything had been organic - word of mouth, LinkedIn posts from customers, direct sales.

When they turned on paid acquisition and hired a growth engineer to optimize onboarding, the results were immediate. Users 5x'd. Support tickets 5x'd right alongside them.

The problem: their CS team was just two people. Response time on support tickets went from five minutes to five hours. For a product that handles people's email (something deeply personal), five hours felt like abandonment.

Richard had to pull everyone in the company onto support tickets. Engineers, salespeople, everyone. They aggressively hired support staff. They wrote documentation for the first time. All of this work that should have been done in January got crammed into about 10 days in March.

As Richard put it: they'd spent a lot of time thinking about what if the marketing strategy doesn't pay off. They hadn't thought about what happens if it works.

The Fix (If You're Making It Now)

1. This week: Write down the three things that would break first if your user count 5x'd tomorrow. Support? Onboarding? Server capacity? Billing? Now sketch a plan for each.

1. This month: Hire one step ahead of where you are today. If you have two support people and growth is accelerating, start hiring the third before you need them. The lag between posting a job and having someone productive is 6-8 weeks minimum.

1. This quarter: Build documentation, templates, and self-serve resources before you need them. These are cheap to create now and extremely expensive to create in a crisis.

The Signal to Watch

Track your support response time weekly. Not average response time (which hides spikes) but 90th percentile response time. If it's creeping up even slightly while growth is accelerating, you're already behind. The time to fix it is when the number starts moving, not when customers start complaining.