I built a service with a buddy of mine (so 2 engineers total) that achieved a scale comparable to Medium circa-2014/2015 (given baseless guesses about Medium's

I built a service with a buddy of mine (so 2 engineers total) that achieved a scale comparable to Medium circa-2014/2015 (given baseless guesses about Medium's scale), with a similar featureset (perhaps more sophisticated, apples to oranges somewhat). It's definitely possible to achieve scale on a small team.