Most company team pages inflate. Ours does the opposite — the team is small, and pretending otherwise would break trust. If you're evaluating LADLE as a vendor, this page tells you the real staffing picture.
Currently
Why so small
Deliberate. The meal-donation economics work at small headcount and get harder at large headcount — every hire adds fixed cost that reduces the discretionary buffer that keeps the $8-per-subscription donation intact. See /careers/why-team-of-one for the fuller reasoning. Growth won't be zero forever; the next hire will happen when the marginal value of the role clearly exceeds what a contractor can provide.
What we don't have
- A CS org. Customer support is the founder. Response time: one business day.
- A sales team. Business inquiries route to partners@ladle.chat; the founder handles the conversation.
- A marketing org. The site content is written by the founder. Distribution is organic + newsletter + word of mouth.
- A designer. The founder does design. The site design system is documented so consistency doesn't require additional staff.
- An HR function. We're too small; if we hire, we'll bring in a fractional HR advisor.
- External investors on the cap table. Founder-owned + revenue-funded.
How this scales
The first additional hire will most likely be a second engineer, to give infrastructure work standing coverage instead of ad-hoc contract help. Any hire is announced on /about/timeline the month it happens. If a functional role gets outsized (support, sales) before we can hire, we say so publicly and rate-limit our growth to what we can support.
Working with us
Interested in joining? /careers covers hiring philosophy and open (and closed) roles. The bar is high because the team is small and each addition is high-leverage. If you’re recruiting us: legal@ladle.chat.