There's no roadmap meeting at Richicinschi. There's a notebook, a terminal, and a strong opinion about what an app should feel like. The whole studio is one person. That isn't a stepping stone on the way to becoming a bigger studio — it's the design.
What 'small' actually means
Small means a short list of apps, each one finished before the next begins. It means no growth team, no investor deck, no quarterly number that something has to ship to hit. When the only stakeholder is the person using the app, most of the usual pressure just evaporates. Nothing gets added because a competitor has it. Nothing gets removed because it didn't move a metric last sprint.
Craft, in detail. Elegant by hand — engineered by code.
The math of one person
People assume solo means slow. Sometimes it does. But one person also means zero coordination cost — no standups, no handoffs, no spec drifting through four inboxes before it becomes code. The distance between 'this feels wrong' and 'this is fixed' is one person noticing and one commit. For small, well-defined apps, that loop is faster than a team, and the result is more coherent, because it all came out of one head.
It also means the person who designed the breathing animation is the person who wrote the audio engine is the person answering your email. Nothing falls through the cracks between departments, because there are no departments.
Saying no, a lot
Staying small is mostly an exercise in declining things. Every feature request, every 'you should also build', every obvious adjacent market — most of them are good ideas that simply aren't this idea. Saying yes to all of them is how a calm breathing app turns into a bloated wellness platform with a social feed nobody asked for. The notebook has a long list of things Breathe will never do, and that list is doing real work.
Why not just grow?
Because the moment you hire, the math changes. Payroll needs revenue, revenue needs growth, and growth needs the exact engagement tricks I'm trying to avoid. A bigger studio would have to put a streak counter in Breathe — the spreadsheet would demand it. Staying one person is what makes it possible to leave that counter out. Small isn't a limitation I'm working around; it's the thing that lets the apps be what they are.
It isn't free. One person is a single point of failure — if I'm sick, nothing ships. Support is slower than a company with a support team. Some customers would rather buy from something that looks bigger and safer than a last name and a terminal. Fair enough. The bet is that for the kind of software I want to make — quiet, careful, personal — the upside of staying small outweighs all of it. A short list of apps, made slowly, by hand. That's the whole pitch, and it's about the right size for a studio this size.