We grew from 6 to 23 people in a year and didnt onboard a single new SaaS tool. The whole company runs on Logbook + Slack + Linear. Thats it.
I'm Sam, head of ops at Pulse AI. We just closed our Series A. Most companies our size are paying for 28 SaaS tools. We're paying for 3, and one of them is Logbook. Here's how that's possible — and what we'd do differently if we did it again.
“The default for early-stage startups is to add a tool every time you have a problem. We did the opposite — we picked a workspace that absorbs problems. The compounding effect of NOT onboarding new tools is something nobody tells you about.”
About us
Series A, 23 people, growing fast.
Hi, I'm Sam. I run ops at Pulse AI. We're an inference infrastructure company — basically we make it cheaper and faster for other AI companies to serve their models. We're a year past founding, just closed Series A from a tier-one fund, currently 23 people split between SF, London and Lagos.
I joined as employee #7. Before that I'd done ops at two other startups that grew from 10 to 80 in similar windows. Both of them ended up with 25-30 SaaS tools and a pretty miserable security audit. I wanted to do this one differently.
6 → 23
Headcount growth
12 months. Engineers, infra, GTM, ops. We're hiring about 2 people per month now and the rate is going up post-Series A.
3 tools
In our SaaS stack
Logbook (ops, vault, boards, KB, time, meetings, reports), Slack (sync chat), Linear (engineering). That's literally it. Plus a handful of dev tools the engineering team uses (GitHub, Vercel etc) which I'm not counting as 'company SaaS.'
$94k
Avoided annual SaaS
Comparable startup at our stage typically spends $120-150k/year on SaaS for ops, vault, KB, meetings, video, file storage, time tracking. We spend $26k. Math is simple.
4 hours
Time to first PR
New eng hires open a PR within 4 hours of starting. Down from like 2 days at our previous places. Onboarding template auto-provisions vault access, repo permissions, calendar setup. They just code.
The problem I came in to solve
Stop the SaaS sprawl before it starts.
The dirty secret of early-stage startups is that every problem feels like it needs its own tool. Vault for secrets. Loom for async. Notion for KB. Asana for projects. Harvest if you bill. Calendly for meetings. Each one solves the problem in front of you. None of them talk to each other. By Series B you've got 30 logins to manage and an off-boarding process that's basically vibes.
I'd seen this movie before. So when I joined Pulse, the founders gave me one ask: 'pick a stack that won't bury us by Series B.' I evaluated like 12 different options. Logbook was the only one that actually replaced multiple tools without being a worse version of any of them.
Our first year, in milestones
We grew 4x and our SaaS bill grew 1.5x. That ratio is unusual.
- 1
Day 0
Whole company onto Logbook in week 1
We were 7 people. Took me 3 days to migrate everything we had (which honestly wasnt much — we were still small). Vault, KB, project boards, all in one workspace by end of week 1.
- 2
Month 3
First eng hire onboarded in 4 hours
Built our 'engineer onboarding' Logbook template. New hire shows up day 1, accepts vault keys, gets repo access, hits a board with their week-1 tasks. Their first PR was merged before lunch on day one.
- 3
Month 6
Hit 15 people, still 3 SaaS tools
This is where most companies onboard their next 5 tools. We didn't. Logbook absorbed the things people came to me asking for — file storage (vault), team wiki (KB), meeting recordings (built in). I said 'no' to like 8 SaaS proposals in this period.
- 4
Month 12 (Series A)
23 people, $94k saved, due diligence smooth
Series A lead's security review took 90 minutes. They'd budgeted half a day. Audit log, EU hosting, vault encryption — all in one place. That alone basically paid for Logbook for the next 5 years.
What we don't have to do, vs what comparable startups deal with.
Before
The old way
- Manage 25-30 SaaS logins per employee with separate SSO setups
- Run a quarterly tool audit because you don't even know what you're paying for anymore
- Off-board departing employees by remembering 18 different admin panels
- Pay for 4 different vendors that all sort of do file storage
- Make security teams review a different vendor for each tool
- Onboard new eng hires across 12 different account creations
After
With Logbook
- 3 SaaS logins (Logbook, Slack, Linear). All SSO from one IdP
- I look at one Logbook usage page once a quarter. Done
- Off-boarding is one button in one tool. Vault keys auto-rotate for projects they were in
- One vault, one file store, one KB. All encrypted. All searchable
- One vendor security review covered 8 features. 90 min, done
- Onboarding template provisions everything in 4 hours. New hire ships same day
“Every tool you don't onboard is a security audit you don't have to do, an off-boarding task you don't have to remember, and a SaaS bill that doesn't compound. Founders never count this cost. They should.”
Sam Okafor
Head of Operations, Pulse AI
Things that were not perfect
What we'd do differently.
Honest moment: we got pushback in month 4 from one of our senior engineers who really wanted Notion for the wiki. He'd been at his last shop for 5 years and was Notion-fluent. We gave it a sincere try — set him up with Notion for a sprint, kept the rest of the team on Logbook KB. He came back two weeks later and asked to switch back. The disconnect between Notion and the rest of our work cost more than the familiarity saved. He's now actually our biggest internal Logbook advocate.
Another thing: the AI meeting transcripts in Logbook are good but not perfect. We use them for internal meetings; for board meetings or investor calls we use a dedicated tool because we want the highest-quality transcript. Know what your tool is for and what its not.
~$120k
Avoided in year 2 too
We're projecting to be around 50 people by end of year 2. Comparable startups at 50 spend $200k+ on SaaS. We're projecting $32k. That delta compounds.
90 min
Security audit time
Series A lead expected to spend 4-6 hours on infrastructure security review. Took 90 minutes because most of it was already in Logbook's compliance docs. That's leverage.
If you're an early-stage founder
The most leveraged ops decision you can make.
If you're a founder reading this and you're between seed and Series A — the most leveraged ops decision you can make this quarter is to NOT onboard another tool. Pick a workspace that absorbs problems instead of one that punts them to the next vendor. We picked Logbook. Not the only choice. But for us it's worked, and it'll work for the foreseeable future too.
Don't add tools. Subtract them.
Build your stack with subtraction.
Logbook absorbs vault, KB, boards, time, meetings and reports. Try it free for 14 days — see what you can stop onboarding.