Case Study: Scaling Reliability for a SaaS from 10 to 100 Customers in 9 Months

Case Study: Scaling Reliability for a SaaS from 10 to 100 Customers in 9 Months

Hook: Rapid growth tests reliability practices. This case study explains the technical and organizational moves that preserved SLAs while scaling customer count tenfold.

Context

The company was a SaaS focused on B2B workflows. Growth went from 10 to 100 paying customers in nine months after a successful product-market fit period. Challenges included capacity planning, onboarding new accounts, and preserving incident MTTR.

Key decisions and why they worked

• From monolith to bounded services: Selective extraction of high-throughput paths followed the migration playbook in From Monolith to Microservices, reducing blast radius and enabling independent scaling.
• Invest in Type-safe SDKs: Adopting TypeScript-first libraries (see the TypeScript-first benchmark) reduced runtime errors in customer integrations and sped up onboarding.
• Automated document capture for onboarding and support: Using a document capture pattern to collect evidence during support escalations — inspired by the DocScan document-capture use cases — reduced repeated investigation time.
• Onboarding playbook and retention: Built a 30-day onboarding runbook modeled on remote onboarding principles from the Remote Onboarding Playbook, which cut churn from early-stage customers.
• Hiring and rotation: Implemented inclusive hiring and rotation practices based on the staffing playbook to prevent knowledge silos and improve resilience during growth.

Operational outcomes

• MTTR improved by 40% due to better telemetry and TypeScript-based contracts.
• Onboarding lead time decreased by 35% because of procedural templates and document capture artifacts.
• Churn fell 20% among newly onboarded customers thanks to improved readiness during the first 30 days.

Lessons for other teams

1. Prioritise the paths that impact customers most and extract them first.
2. Invest in type-safe contracts to avoid integration churn.
3. Automate evidence capture for repetitive support flows — it saves time in postmortems and compliance.
4. Formalise onboarding and make it measurable.

“Growth exposes the weakest operational assumptions — make those assumptions visible and measure them.”

Templates and links

• Migration playbook: mono-to-micro.
• Type safety benchmarks: TypeScript-first libraries.
• Document capture in operations: DocScan Cloud.
• Remote onboarding curriculum: Remote Onboarding Playbook.
• Inclusive hiring guidance: Staffing Playbook.

Closing

Scaling reliability requires both architecture and organisational playbooks. The fastest, safest growth came from a mix of targeted extraction, type-safe integrations, and disciplined onboarding backed by inclusive hiring.

Related Reading

• Playlist & Sync Opportunities from Film Slates: How Filoni’s New Star Wars List Affects Music Placements
• Creative Careers and the Invisible Toll: Stories from Transmedia and Graphic Novel Teams
• Astrology & Fandom: Using Star Wars Archetypes to Map Your Relationship Dynamics
• Step-by-Step: Verifying Streaming Credentials with DNS and Meta Tags (Template + Script)
• Buying E-Scooters for Your Fleet: From Commuter Models to 50 mph Machines