The Team Behind Busyexpand: 7 People, 26 Projects, Zero Bloat

Most of them have been through this before — signed on with an agency that talked about a "team of twenty," and ended up with one exhausted junior dev and a project manager who'd never written a line of code in his life. So we've stopped dressing up the answer. Seven people. Twenty-six projects since we started in 2020. Clients in six countries. And honestly, we're in no hurry to add an eighth.

That last bit tends to surprise people.

Why we haven't hired faster

The usual playbook in this industry is to scale headcount and hope the process keeps up. We've seen what that looks like from the client's side, because plenty of them have told us — a Slack channel with a dozen people in it, most of whom never say a word, and somehow the deadline still slips anyway. More people doesn't mean more gets done. Half the time it just means more handoffs, more meetings, more chances for the thing you actually asked for to get lost somewhere between the client call and whoever's actually typing.

So we went the other way. Everyone on this team is someone we'd hand a client call to without hovering, because on most days, that's exactly what happens.

Who's actually behind the screen

Sasu Igbinosa and Divineprince Charles are our full-stack developers, and they're the reason your dashboard doesn't choke under load or your checkout doesn't die at two in the morning. Reinhard Omogware does mobile — if you came to us wanting an app instead of a website, you've already dealt with him, whether his name rang a bell or not. Victor Elder is frontend, which means he's the one making sure the design you approved on paper still feels right once it's sitting in an actual browser on an actual phone.

Perfect Ossum handles graphics and video, and that job is bigger than it sounds once you're doing brand assets, product shots, and the little bits of motion that make a page feel alive rather than a stack of static boxes. Elena Vega runs operations for the agency, which is the less exciting job of making sure nothing quietly disappears between "yes, we'll take this on" and the thing actually shipping. And then there's me — product and operations — which mostly means I'm the one who tells you the truth about your timeline even when you were hoping for a different answer.

Seven names. No rotating bench of contractors we bring in when it gets busy. No gap between the people on the website and the people who show up in your inbox.

What that actually gets you

It's not a slogan we put on a slide. It changes how the work happens, in some pretty concrete ways.

You're talking to the person building it, full stop. If Sasu or Victor has a question about something you said, they ask you — nobody's relaying it through three layers first. And because it's seven people, not twenty-five, there's rarely a moment where one person on the team doesn't know something everyone else already does. Process is what agencies lean on when the team's gotten too big to just talk to each other; we haven't gotten there, and we're in no rush to.

We also say no a fair amount. Small team, limited hours in the day, so every project we take is one we actually think we can do justice to. If we don't think we're right for it, we'll say so — and usually point you toward someone who is.

That's probably the biggest reason 96% of our work ends up being repeat business or referrals. Founders don't come back to the agency that made them feel like ticket #4471. They come back to whoever actually picked up the phone last time.

Slow growth isn't a limitation, it's the strategy

We do add people — we've done it a few times since 2020. But every hire has to clear one bar first: does this person make the team more capable, or just bigger? Those sound like the same thing and they're not, and mixing them up is usually how a good small agency turns into a mediocre bigger one without anyone quite noticing.

Next time you're vetting who's going to build your product, ask them one question: who, by name, is doing the actual work? If they can't answer that in a sentence, you already know what you need to know.

We can. Sasu, Divineprince, Reinhard, Victor, Perfect, Elena, and me. Seven people, twenty-six projects — and the plan is to still know everyone's name at fifty.

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Illustration by Rahmad Kurniawan