A personal essay on SaaS ego, user trust, and what happens when startup culture forgets who built it.

I’ve got a specific kind of SaaS company that drives me insane.

Not the small team trying to build something useful. Not the founder answering support tickets at midnight. Not the early-stage company that’s still figuring out its pricing, product, market, and onboarding while trying to keep the lights on. I can respect that stage because at least there’s usually some humility baked into it. Every user matters, every piece of feedback feels valuable, and every signup feels like proof that maybe the thing has a shot.

I’m talking about the company that starts there, then grows just enough to forget it ever needed people in the first place.

The company that begins with open doors, no-title energy, laid-back conversations, and genuine appreciation for its users, then slowly becomes a corporate maze where executives are untouchable, titles matter more than ideas, and users are treated like they should feel lucky to be allowed on the platform. The company that starts cheering every customer win, then eventually acts like users are just another row in the revenue model.

That’s the part I can’t stand.

Growth isn’t the problem. Companies should absolutely grow if they’re building something useful. People deserve to make money when they solve real problems. Teams need structure, leadership, systems, and processes as they get bigger. I’m not arguing that every SaaS company should stay small forever, operating on vibes, Slack messages, and whatever was written on a whiteboard six months ago.

The problem is when growth turns into ego.

The short version is this: I’ve watched SaaS companies start as grateful, accessible, user-focused teams and slowly become the exact kind of bloated corporate environment they probably used to make fun of. I’ve been inside that shift. I was an early hire at one company that started with a laid-back, no-title, open-door culture, and by the time I left, it felt like a premium-priced corporate nightmare with subpar features and a level of ego inflation I couldn’t stomach anymore.

That experience stuck with me because it wasn’t just about one company. It was a pattern I started noticing everywhere.

Growth Isn’t the Problem

A company growing is not automatically a bad thing. In fact, growth can be a great thing when it gives a team the resources to improve the product, support users better, build better infrastructure, hire good people, and solve bigger problems. A company with five employees can’t operate the same way as a company with five hundred employees, and pretending otherwise would be ridiculous.

Structure has a purpose. Clear roles can help. Better processes can prevent chaos. Leadership needs to make decisions. Teams need ownership. Support needs systems. Product teams need roadmaps. Sales needs a way to explain whatever it is they’re tasked with explaining. Finance probably wants everyone to stop spending money like the company is a group project with a debit card (which, ya know… fair enough).

So no, I’m not anti-growth. I’m not anti-process. I’m not anti-leadership.

What I’m against is the weird personality change that happens when a company starts confusing success with superiority. Early on, SaaS companies are usually grateful for every user because they have to be. Feedback gets read carefully. Users are thanked. Support feels human. Roadmap decisions feel close to actual customer problems. There’s a sense that the company is still earning its place.

Then something changes.

The company gets funding, logos, bigger customers, more employees, more press, crazier dashboards, more meetings, and suddenly… the tone shifts. Users become accounts. Accounts become seats. Seats become expansion opportunities. Feedback becomes noise. Complaints become edge cases. Early supporters become legacy users who are apparently inconvenient because they’re still on a plan that made sense before someone discovered the phrase “pricing optimization.”

That shift from appreciation to arrogance is where things start to rot.

A healthy company matures. An egotistical company hardens. There’s a big difference between building structure so the business can serve people better and building layers that separate decision-makers from the people using the product. One makes the company stronger. The other makes it colder.

And users can feel the difference.

They can tell when a company is still trying to earn their trust, and they can tell when the company has decided trust is already owed. They can tell when pricing changes reflect real value, and when pricing changes feel like someone figured out how trapped the customer base is. They can tell when the company is improving the product, and when it’s dressing up average features as premium value because the sales deck needed something shiny.

Growth should make a company more useful, not more impressed with itself.

That’s the sticky line for me.

I’ve Watched the Culture Shift From the Inside

I’ve worked for a few SaaS companies, and one experience in particular shaped how I think about this. I was there near the ground floor as an early hire. The company had the kind of environment people love to talk about when they’re describing startup culture at its best. It was laid back, open-door, no-title, collaborative, and full of people who seemed genuinely excited to build something.

At first, it felt like ideas could come from anywhere. People were accessible. Leaders were visible. Conversations happened naturally. The customer still felt close because the company was small enough that user problems could move quickly through the building. There wasn’t this heavy feeling that every suggestion needed to climb a hierarchy ladder just to be acknowledged.

And then, over time, it changed.

Not all at once, and that’s an important note in this story. These things rarely happen overnight. It’s not like everyone walks in on a Monday and suddenly the culture has been replaced by cubicles, executive mystique, and a meeting invite called “Strategic Alignment Sync.” It happens slowly enough that people can pretend it’s just the natural cost of growth.

Doors start closing. Titles start mattering. Conversations become more controlled. Access becomes political. Executives become harder to reach, then eventually feel almost untouchable. The same people who used to be available and human start feeling like internal celebrities, surrounded by layers and protected by a strange amount of corporate gravity.

That celebrity energy is one of the worst parts. I don’t mean actual fame, obviously. I mean the strange, icky, cringey internal version of it, where leadership starts getting treated less like people with responsibility and more like figures everyone else is lucky to be near. The CEO becomes a symbol instead of a person. Executives become guarded. Decisions come down from rooms most employees never enter. The open-door culture becomes open-door in the same way some websites have “contact us” pages that clearly go nowhere.

The company I joined and the company I left did not feel like the same place.

And I want to be fair here. Some structure was necessary. A growing company can’t stay in chaos forever, and not every employee can be involved in every decision. But structure is one thing. Ego wrapped in structure is another.

That’s where it lost me.

The original laid-back environment became a corporate nightmare, and the product did not improve enough to justify the attitude. That’s the part that really bothered me. If a company becomes more structured, more expensive, and more serious because the product is becoming undeniably better, at least there’s an argument there. But when the features are subpar at best, the pricing is premium, and the culture acts like everyone should be grateful to witness the brilliance, it’s hard not to feel like something has gone very wrong.

Eventually, I quit because I couldn’t respect what it had become. Not because every person there was bad. Not because growth itself ruined everything. But because the ego inflation became too much to ignore, and once you see that kind of shift clearly, it’s hard to unsee it.

Users Become Revenue Targets Instead of People

One of the fastest ways SaaS companies lose the plot is by forgetting that users helped build the platform.

Early users are not just people who happened to show up before the company got popular. In many cases, they’re the reason the company got popular. They tolerate rough edges, submit feedback, explain use cases, recommend the product, defend it internally, and keep using it while the company figures out what it’s actually supposed to be. They give the product a chance before it fully deserves one.

That deserves respect.

Instead, a lot of companies eventually start treating those users like leftover baggage from an earlier era. The pricing changes. The plans get restructured. Features get moved behind higher tiers. The product gets repackaged in a way that somehow always seems to cost more. Users are told this is about value, flexibility, alignment, or some other polished word that sounds great until you realize it means they’re paying more for things they didn’t ask for.

I’m not saying pricing should never change. Products cost money to build and maintain. Support costs money. Infrastructure costs money. Good employees cost money. A company has to survive, and if the product genuinely becomes more valuable over time, the pricing may need to reflect that.

But there’s a difference between charging more because the value has increased and charging more because users are dependent.

That difference matters.

Users can tell when they’re being offered something better, and they can tell when they’re being squeezed. They know when a feature bundle makes sense and when it feels like the company buried the useful thing inside a higher-priced plan because it knew people needed it. They know when they’re being respected and when they’re being monetized more aggressively.

Support often changes too. In the early days, support can feel like someone trying to solve your problem. Later, it can start feeling like the company built a wall and hired polite people to stand in front of it. Responses get more scripted. Policies get quoted more often. The human tone disappears. The issue may technically be acknowledged, but that does not mean anyone is actually trying to fix it.

Communication gets colder as well. Companies start saying less with more words (a huge pet peeve of mine). Every update feels polished but oddly empty. A pricing increase becomes “an updated packaging model.” A removed feature becomes “a better aligned experience.” A frustrating product change becomes “a step toward improving customer outcomes.” It’s all very professional, which is sometimes just another way of saying nobody wants to say the plain version out loud.

The users are not beneath the company. They’re the reason the company exists.

That should be obvious, but apparently obvious things need repeating once a company gets enough conference rooms.

Product Quality Can Get Worse While the Company Looks More Successful

One of the most frustrating parts of SaaS ego inflation is that the company can look more successful from the outside while the product experience gets worse for actual users. Trust me, I could write a book with the countless examples I can point to on this topic alone. 

The company is growing. The branding looks better (sometimes). The website is shinier. The sales deck is sharper. The logos are bigger. The team is larger. The executive titles are more impressive. The pricing is higher. Everything looks more legitimate.

Then you use the product and wonder why it takes six clicks to do something that used to take two.

Product bloat is real. A platform starts with a clear problem, solves it well enough to earn trust, then slowly adds feature after feature until the original usefulness gets buried under layers of complexity. Some features are genuinely helpful, but others feel like they were built for sales conversations, investor updates, competitor comparison pages, or enterprise checklists more than actual user needs.

More features do not automatically mean a better product.

Sometimes it feels like adding rooms to a house while ignoring the leaking roof. Sure, the house is bigger now, and there’s a new “collaboration lounge” or whatever we’re calling the feature nobody requested, but the kitchen still floods every time it rains. At some point, users stop being impressed by expansion and start wondering why the basics are still broken.

This is where internal priorities can start replacing customer outcomes. The roadmap becomes less about what users need and more about what the company wants to say it has. Product decisions get shaped by revenue expansion, executive preferences, positioning, and whatever makes the platform look bigger. The company starts building for itself.

That doesn’t mean every new feature is bad. It doesn’t mean enterprise needs are fake. It doesn’t mean a company should only build what users ask for directly, because users can be wrong too. Sometimes customers ask for symptoms, not solutions. A company still needs judgment and vision.

But when the product starts serving the company more than the people using it, the experience changes.

You can feel when a tool is built to help you do your job better, and you can feel when it’s built to justify a pricing page. You can feel when the company understands your workflow, and you can feel when it’s trying to push you through whatever model makes the metrics look better.

That’s what bothers me about premium pricing for subpar features. If the product is excellent, the support is strong, the communication is honest, and the company is making users more successful, then premium pricing has a case. But when the feature set is average, the product feels bloated, and the culture acts like the company is doing users a favor by letting them pay more, the ego becomes impossible to ignore.

Success on paper does not automatically mean usefulness in practice.

Why I Couldn’t Stay Around That Ego

The reason I left that company wasn’t one single moment. It was the accumulation of a lot of small changes that started pointing in the same direction.

The culture stopped feeling like the one I joined. The environment that once felt open and collaborative started feeling status-driven and controlled. The company that once felt grateful started feeling entitled. The product didn’t seem strong enough to justify the confidence, and the pricing did not feel aligned with the quality. The whole thing started feeling like a place where the company believed its own story a little too much.

That is a hard thing to sit inside once you notice it.

It’s strange watching a company develop an ego because companies are made of people, and many of those people are probably still good, thoughtful, hardworking people. That’s why I try not to turn this into a personal attack on individuals. The problem is usually bigger than one person. It’s a culture, a set of incentives, a leadership style, a growing distance from users, and a creeping belief that success validates every decision.

But the effect is still real.

The laid-back environment became something I no longer recognized. What started as a place where people could talk openly became a place where rank mattered more. What started as an environment with energy became one with corporate theater. What started as customer appreciation became customer extraction dressed up in nicer language.

I don’t respect growth that forgets gratitude.

That might sound simple, but it’s one of the clearest business values I have. If users helped you get there, you should not treat them like they’re lucky you still allow them to pay you. If employees helped build the culture, you should not replace that culture with hierarchy and expect everyone to clap. If early trust helped create your momentum, you should not spend the next phase burning that trust for short-term revenue.

The bigger a company gets, the more intentional it has to be about staying humble. Not fake humble. Not “we’re so grateful for our amazing community” in the caption while every decision says otherwise. Real humility. The kind that shows up in pricing, support, product decisions, communication, and how leadership treats people when there’s no branding benefit attached.

That’s what I didn’t see enough of, and that’s why I couldn’t stay.

The Kind of SaaS Growth I Respect

I still respect SaaS companies that grow well.

I respect companies that scale without getting too impressed with themselves. Companies that keep listening, not performatively, but practically. They pay attention to support patterns, sales objections, product usage, customer language, and the parts of the product people keep stumbling over. They understand that listening does not mean obeying every request. It means staying close enough to reality that you don’t start believing your own internal narrative over the user’s lived experience.

I respect companies where growth improves the product. More resources should lead to better reliability, clearer communication, stronger support, smarter workflows, and more useful features. The experience should get better as the company grows, not heavier, colder, and more expensive for no obvious reason.

I respect companies that can serve bigger customers without abandoning the smaller ones that helped them get there. Moving upmarket may make business sense, but there’s a way to do it without treating early users like a pricing inconvenience. Communicate honestly. Offer fair transitions. Don’t hide behind vague messaging. Don’t act like loyalty is something to exploit.

I also respect companies that keep leadership connected to users. Executives do not need to answer every ticket, but they should not become so insulated that they only understand the customer through dashboards and filtered reports. Dashboards are useful, but they’re not the whole truth. A metric can tell you what happened. It doesn’t always tell you how it felt.

That matters because user trust is not just built through features. It is built through repeated evidence that the company still cares. A useful product helps. Honest communication helps. Fair pricing helps. Human support helps. Leaders who don’t act like the company is a gift to humanity definitely help.

SaaS companies can grow without becoming arrogant. They can be ambitious without becoming entitled. They can build structure without turning into a hierarchy parade. They can make money without treating users like they’re trapped at the checkout counter.

That, my friends, is the kind of growth I respect.

My Final Thoughts

Let me just sum this up again for the sake of emphasis. Growth isn’t the problem. SaaS ego is.

I’ve watched companies start small, grateful, accessible, and user-focused, then slowly become bloated, hierarchical, expensive, and strangely impressed with themselves. I’ve seen the open-door culture become closed-door leadership. I’ve seen no-title collaboration turn into status games. I’ve seen average features get packaged like premium value. I’ve seen users go from appreciated partners to revenue targets.

And I hate that shift.

Not because companies shouldn’t grow. Not because pricing should never change. Not because leadership should never create structure. But because growth should come with more responsibility, not less humility.

Users are not lucky to be on the platform. The platform is lucky users trusted it enough to help it grow.

If a SaaS company forgets that, it may still become bigger, richer, and more recognizable. It may still win enterprise deals, publish polished updates, and fill its website with impressive logos.

But it will lose something harder to replace.

It will lose trust, and once users stop believing the company is still on their side, every new feature, pricing update, and corporate statement starts getting read through that lens.

The best SaaS companies don’t just grow.

They remember who got them there.