Some things have to change as your SaaS company grows bigger. But not all things.If your company is bootstrapped and growing very fast, you can choose what to change and what to keep doing.

If your unusual culture or business model works, you can do more of it. You don’t have to follow someone else’s playbook.

Sometimes that’s where the opportunity is—doing things everyone else can’t or won’t do.

Robin Alex Alex is a cofounder of HighLevel, one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies around.

After five years, they already have 60,000 customers and 750 employees. They grew fast without outside funding.

They are doing a few big things very differently than VC-funded software companies.

• Their aggressive pricing model hasn’t changed much since they started HighLevel in 2018.
• Their 23 product teams still are told to “ship fast, break things, and fix it fast,” just like that did when they started.
• They still sell through their agency partners who white-label HighLevel and create their own branded products for their end users.
• They didn’t create multiple levels of hierarchical management with experienced C-level executives at the top.

These things power their explosive growth and don’t need to be “fixed,” according to Robin:

“People tell you to read the books and to just copy and paste what the books say and that’s what will get you to success. The adage of what you do today is not what’s going to get you there tomorrow. I call that baloney.

“Whatever we started with today will still get us going for tomorrow. So we just keep doing it. Just doing 10 times harder, 10 times better, 10 times more efficient. I honestly think there’s a high possibility that if you multiply what you do today, it will work tomorrow. to create the flywheel effect. And I think that’s what helped us grow so fast.

“Don’t feel obligated to change for anyone. Just because a book says this or somebody else did that in their way, doesn’t mean that has to be right for you. If you’re finding success and you’re playing the game that you’re playing, you’ll be just fine. There are so many ways to do this.”

I met Robin at one of my SaaS CEO meetups here in Dallas on Friday. He’s a humble guy. He jumped right in to help other local founders. That’s who Robin was before HighLevel became big, and he’s not changing it now.

That almost never happens here in Dallas. Local founders who have grown big companies go into the enclave with other rich folks. They stop hanging out and helping the next generation of founders. Not helpful.

Thanks for showing us another way to change the world, Robin.

Check out this episode of the Practical Founders Podcast.

Thanks for sharing your story with other #practicalfounders, Robin.