Built for teams of 3 to 20, not 3,000
Small enough that every person is already on Claude Max. Big enough that coordinating through email stops scaling.
I get a version of this email every week. "We're a 400-person company. Any chance we could pilot Spatio with one team?"
The answer is almost always no, and it takes some explaining. So here it is in one place.
The range we care about: 3 to 20 people
Spatio is built for teams in roughly that range. Small enough that every person on the team is already paying for Claude Max (or Cursor, or whatever they chose) out of pocket or on a small company card. Big enough that coordinating through DMs and email has started breaking.
This is not some arbitrary marketing segment. It's the range where the product actually works today.
Under 3 people, MCP alone gets you most of the value. The review layer doesn't matter yet because there's nobody to review across. Spatio is still useful solo, but you're paying for a collaborative surface you're not using.
3 to 20 is the sweet spot. Shared artifact feed means your cofounder's agent updating the forecast shows up in your review queue. The review layer becomes load-bearing.
20 to 50 still works. It starts to need things we're just shipping. Proper permissioning, workspace subdivisions, approval chains. On the roadmap.
Over 50 people, don't use Spatio. You need things we don't have and aren't planning to build anytime soon.
Why not go upmarket
The honest answer: the product would get worse.
Enterprise-grade means SSO, SCIM, SOC 2, audit logs, an MSA your legal team and mine negotiate for six weeks. None of that is hard engineering, but each of those things demands design decisions that make the product worse for the 8-person team. "Which admin can change which IAM role for this workspace" is a question nobody in a small team wants to be asked.
Every feature we've shipped has been filtered through one question. Does this make the product worse for the team-of-ten? If the answer is yes, it doesn't ship. That filter gets destroyed the moment we start chasing the 400-person customer.
So we won't chase it. If a large company wants to adopt Spatio organically, one team at a time, picking it up the same way they'd pick up Notion or Linear, great. They're welcome. But the feature set, the pricing, the support flow, all of it is tuned for small teams.
Why AI-forward
"AI-forward" is a shorthand I use a lot. What I actually mean:
- Every person on the team has a coding agent they use daily. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, take your pick.
- They already feel the pain of that agent being helpful at code and useless at everything else.
- They're comfortable dropping four lines of JSON into a config file.
- They don't need a sales call to try new tooling.
If that's your team, Spatio is built for you. If it isn't, the product will feel underbaked, because so much of the design assumes you already have an agent you trust.
The startups and agencies part
In practice the teams that pick up Spatio fastest split about evenly between two shapes.
Early-stage startups. 3 to 15 people, mostly builders. Agents are already embedded in how they ship code. Spatio extends the agent's reach to the non-code work. Customer updates, team standups, sheet-based planning, docs.
Small agencies and studios. 8 to 30 people doing client work. Lots of artifacts flying around per week. Decks, briefs, status updates, invoices, notes. Agents can draft most of it. Spatio is where those drafts land for the PM or owner to review before they go to a client.
If you're a different shape and it's working for you, I want to hear about it. Email me. The founder still reads every email.
What you get at this size that enterprise can't
A few things, roughly in order of importance.
- Velocity. We ship what you ask for. If you email me something broken on a Tuesday morning, there's a real chance it's fixed by Thursday.
- Simplicity. There is no admin panel to configure. There are no "workspaces" and "organizations" and "groups" to wrangle. You sign up, you invite the team, you work.
- Price. Flat per-seat. Bulk discount at three. No "schedule a call for pricing."
- Honesty. When something's not ready, we say so. When we change direction, we write about it. This blog is how we do it.
If you're over 50 people and reading this
Thank you for being here. Honestly. I hope in two years we've figured out the right way to serve larger teams, and I'd like you to come back then.
In the meantime, if you have one small team that looks like our ICP (3 to 20, AI-forward, tired of their agent being helpless at non-code work), they can sign up today, put it on a credit card, and tell you what they think. That's the pilot we're good at.
Matt