#98: Break to Scale & LambdaTest’s Breakthrough
September 21, 2025 – DevTools Brew #98
I’m Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery. Every week, I share the raw, often uncomfortable lessons from building and scaling a tech startup from 0 to 1 and beyond.
In today's edition:
Break to Scale
→ When growth demands you break what works
LambdaTest’s Breakthrough
→ How LambdaTest scaled by killing their MVP
Let’s dive in.
Break to scale
What gets you to $1M is rarely what gets you to scale.
There’s a moment around the $1–2M ARR mark.
Everything works.
Just not fast enough. Not big enough. Not repeatable enough.
The engine’s running but it’s capped.
And the hardest part is this:
→ You have to break what’s working.
Not what’s broken.
What’s working.
At Qovery, we hit that wall.
Our product was good.
Our customers were happy.
Our revenue was growing.
But we were stuck between two worlds:
→ Too advanced for the early-stage market.
→ Not focused enough for the mid-market.
And worst of all, we knew it.
But knowing isn’t the hard part.
Letting go is.
That shift really clicked after a full day with one of our board members, former CTO at Skype, Twilio, and Checkout.
He had lived this exact transition. Many times.
And helped us see what we were avoiding:
→ Stop optimizing what’s “working.”
→ Set higher targets. Work backward from what real scale looks like.
→ Start building for what scales.
We had to make hard calls:
Kill a GTM motion that was working: inbound leads with tiny tickets, no upsell, no leverage. We had to go upmarket.
Redefine our ICP and persona: not just who loved the product, but who would scale with it.
Rebuild our narrative, from the ground up: what we had was working for inbound. But for outbound and partners? We needed a sharper story. One they hadn’t heard before, when nobody knows you and doesn’t wait for you.
Add new acquisition channels: break our mono-channel comfort. Outbound and channel felt unnatural at first. But necessary to reach the next level.
Restructure how we operate as team: more ownership, fewer silos. Make sure the product we ship is what the market expects.
Raise the bar on hiring and org design: clarity, autonomy, cross-team velocity. Not more people better leverage.
Each change felt like a risk.
Like we were cutting momentum.
But here’s what I learned:
→ If you don’t break it, it breaks you.
Scaling is not about protecting what works.
But challenging what no longer serves.
And that’s the paradox:
→ The more traction you have, the harder it gets to kill your darlings.
→ The more growth you want, the more you need to outgrow your comfort zones.
Now, when something works, I ask myself: Is it helping us scale? Or Is it just helping us survive?
The real danger is not in what’s broken.
But in what’s working, just enough to stay the same.
LambdaTest’s Breakthrough
(Under the radar. Over the threshold.)
Some companies make a lot of noise.
Others quietly build.
LambdaTest is one of the latter.
No loud PMF announcement. No flashy logo wall.
Just relentless execution and a turning point when it mattered.
They started with a simple, relatable product:
→ Cross-browser testing. Low ACV. Easy to adopt.
It worked. They got 100 customers.
But it wasn’t scalable.
It was a foot in the door, not a business.
That’s when Asad Khan (CEO) and his team made the call:
→ Use the first product to learn.
→ Launch a second, adjacent product with higher ACV and stronger pull: HyperExecute.
→ Shift from building “what’s easy to sell” to “what’s hard to replace”.
That changed everything.
The ACV jumped from $180 to $5–25K.
They didn’t just get new users. They got demand — tickets, feedback, urgency.
But they didn’t stop there.
They made four critical changes to hit real PMF:
Re-segment the market.
→ The MVP attracted broad interest but not the right depth.→ So they zoomed in on power users with real automation needs, not casual testers.
→ They looked for unsolicited feedback, not referrals, not vanity signups.
Switch the growth model.
→ Started with PLG: low-capital, low-friction.
→ But realized PLG hits a ceiling in small TAMs.
→ Added top-down enterprise motion: fewer deals, higher impact. Hybrid GTM became the unlock.
Upgrade the product mindset.
→ Moved from shipping features to optimizing for reliability, test quality, and DX.
→ PMF wasn’t just about usage but was about retention, speed, and customer trust.
→ Asked: “What do customers really come for?” Not UI. Not edge use cases. → Confidence.
Kill what’s working (but not scaling).
→ They let go of the early product as the core.
→ Accepted churn from smaller customers.
→ Focused on the segment that demanded performance, not just adopted it casually.
“$1M ARR isn’t always PMF. It could just be a good MVP.” — Asad Khan (LambdaTest CEO)
Their breakthrough didn’t come from one launch or one feature.
It came from stacking insights, letting go of false positives, and building for what’s next.
And that’s the lesson:
Breakthroughs don’t always look like growth.
Sometimes they look like letting go of what got you here.
That’s it for me today! :)
Thanks for reading and Happy Sunday!
— Morgan
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Do you like personal lessons like this? More insights/stories from other devtool founders? Let me know, I’m always open to feedback.
You can reach out to me on LinkedIn.