How to Build a Revenue-Generating System: Customer Retention Strategies, and Sales Funnel Optimization for Exponential Growth

Scaling is Ruining Your Business

You keep hiring, chasing new leads, and grinding harder, but somehow, everything feels like it’s slowing down. Your team has grown, yet execution is clunky. You’re stuck in endless meetings. Revenue isn’t scaling as fast as your headcount. Instead of a well-oiled machine, your business feels like it’s collapsing under its own weight.

What if the very thing you thought would accelerate your success—hiring more people, expanding faster, chasing bigger sales goals—was actually holding you back?

Ludovic Bodin ?? Network State (Singapore) , an entrepreneur and investor behind multiple billion-dollar companies, made that same mistake. Author of Atomic Scaling: How Small Teams Create Huge Growth, Ludovic followed the “Always Be Hiring” mantra, only to realize that every new hire slowed him down. Meanwhile, gaming giants like Supercell built billion-dollar empires with teams a fraction of the size.

The truth? More isn’t better. Better is better.

If you’re an entrepreneur, founder, or business leader drowning in complexity, stuck in hiring chaos, or watching your growth plateau despite adding more people, you need to hear this.

Why Most Startups Scale the Wrong Way (And Why It’s Killing Them)

“Founders have been brainwashed to believe that scaling means hiring. The truth? The more you hire, the slower you grow.”

If you’re running a startup or growing business, you’ve probably been told the key to scaling is hiring. More people means more output, right? The more hands you have, the faster you can execute?

That’s the biggest lie in business growth.

Hiring too fast creates chaos, slows execution, and drains resources. Instead of gaining momentum, businesses get stuck in an endless cycle of onboarding, misalignment, and fixing problems that didn’t exist before.

The “Always Be Hiring” Trap

Silicon Valley pushes the "Always Be Hiring" mindset—where raising more money means adding more employees. But this approach only works if you have unlimited capital and can afford to burn cash while figuring things out. For most businesses, it’s a disaster.

Ludovic Bodin ?? Network State (Singapore) learned this firsthand. He was running a fast-growing, VC-backed company and was constantly hiring. Every new hire felt like raising the bar, bringing in fresh talent with impressive resumes. But something was off.

• The more he hired, the less productive the team became.
• The more he focused on hiring, the less he was focused on actually growing the business.
• The more employees he added, the harder it became to make decisions and execute quickly.

Instead of scaling up, he was stuck fixing the problems that hiring created. And he’s not alone. Many founders think growing the team is the answer, when in reality, it’s making them move slower.

Supercell’s Billion-Dollar Secret: Stay Small, Move Fast

Supercell, the gaming company behind Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, and Clash Royale, built one of the most successful mobile games of all time, generating over $10 billion in revenue. Their development team? Just five people.

Meanwhile, Ludovic’s team had 25+ employees and struggled to launch a single game.

“Great individuals do not necessarily make a great team.” – Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell

Instead of bloating their company with unnecessary hires, they focused on keeping teams small, efficient, and highly accountable.

Why Small Teams Scale Faster

When your team is small, decisions happen faster, meetings are shorter, and everyone is fully engaged. There’s no room for passive participants or extra layers of approval. Everyone has ownership.

• Speed: Fewer people = faster execution.
• Accountability: In a small team, no one can hide. Everyone contributes.
• Focus: Less time spent managing people, more time spent on growth.
• Culture: Small teams communicate better and move in sync.

If Supercell can build a $10B empire with five people, maybe the answer isn’t hiring more. Maybe the answer is hiring less—and scaling smarter.

Retention Over Reach: Why Keeping Customers Matters More Than Finding New Ones

“Don’t let your customers quit.” – Nicolo Laurent, CEO of Riot Games

Most companies obsess over lead generation. More ads. More outreach. More traffic.

But the real money isn’t in finding new customers—it’s in keeping the ones you already have.

The Cost of Losing a Customer

Every time a customer leaves, you’re throwing away future revenue. Riot Games realized that if they could keep players engaged longer, they didn’t have to rely on expensive ads to bring in new ones.

"If a player got kicked out of a clan and didn’t join a new one within two weeks, they were gone forever."

Instead of just accepting churn, Riot took action:

• Players removed from a clan received at least three invites to join a new one.
• If they didn’t accept, they were placed into a group of other "kicked" players who had nowhere else to go.
• Instead of quitting, these players found a new identity—and many thrived.

How to Apply This to Your Business

• Find your “critical moment.” Where do customers typically drop off?
• Create a safety net. What’s your version of Riot’s “three invites to a new clan”?
• Act before they quit. Keep customers engaged before they leave.

If you can keep them engaged, you’ll never have to chase leads again.

The Freemium Model—How Giving Away Value Creates Massive Revenue

“The more you give, the more you receive.”

Skype let people make unlimited calls to other Skype users for zero cost. Within two years, they had 50 million users. By the time Microsoft acquired them, they had 600 million users and sold for $8.5 billion.

The freemium model works because:

• Commitment Bias: Free users feel invested in the product.
• Loss Aversion: Once someone is used to premium features, they don’t want to lose them.
• Network Effects: The more users a free product has, the more valuable it becomes.

Instead of trying to sell upfront, start by giving value first. The companies that master freemium don’t just get more customers—they build empires.

Scale Smarter, Play to Win

You started this journey thinking growth meant more—more hires, more leads, more sales. But now, you see the truth: scaling isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing less, better.

So—what will you do today that scales your business forever?

About Ludovic Bodin

Ludovic Bodin ?? Network State (Singapore) is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and gaming industry expert who has mastered the art of scaling businesses without the chaos. Having worked with billion-dollar companies like Supercell and Riot Games, he specializes in freemium business models, customer retention, and scalable revenue systems. As a global speaker and author of Atomic Scaling, he helps businesses turn engaged users into lifelong customers.