ScaleMath 2025 Year in Review

Welcome to ScaleMath’s 2025 year in review. 

First of all – Happy New Year. Here’s to 2026! 🥂🎉🎆

I hope all of you have had an incredible winter break (or Christmas 🎄 break if you celebrate) & a wonderful New Year’s Eve with family and friends. 

In case you’re here for the first time, here’s a bit about us: 

• ScaleMath is the operating partner of choice for industry-leading companies with a strong focus on customer acquisition and experience. In short, we run growth (product marketing, strategy, and beyond) for your favorite brands. 
• We’re a team of creative & driven operators. Interested in joining us? Email us at [email protected] & try to make it impossible to ignore you. 
• From engaging writing and technical documentation to email, video ads, video tutorials, and beyond – we’re the team category leaders trust to deliver best-in-class work and outcomes others can’t. Let’s talk. 
• The outcome: Build better software/products/services, & reach more users. 

But we couldn’t do this alone. 

ScaleMath exists because of the trust placed in us by the teams and companies we work with. We’re grateful for the opportunity to work on problems that matter, with people who care deeply about the quality of what they put into the world.

To the founders, C-suite, and teams who made that possible: thank you. 

Thank you for the openness, the thoughtful feedback, the shared ownership, and for holding us to a standard worthy of your our customers and users.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate what a year it’s been & look ahead to 2026.

A Higher Bar for Execution

2025 was the year it became clear to us (and I believe many other organizations) that the hardest part of our work was no longer execution speed – it was (and is) judgment. 

Roughly three years into the widespread adoption of AI, its impact is now clearer. Although still frequently subject to change, the impacts themselves are no longer theoretical. 

AI has meaningfully raised the floor on execution. It has accelerated “drafts” (across writing, ideation, and engineering), reduced friction, and made iteration cheaper. 

What it has not done is raise the ceiling.

Judgment, taste, context, and accountability remain stubbornly human.

And in many cases, the gap between good and great has become more visible, not less. Not to mention, as the cost of producing “something” dropped, the standard for producing work that actually matters went up.

At ScaleMath, we view AI as a powerful tool, not a substitute for ownership. 

It supports speed and leverage, but it does not replace understanding the problem, making hard tradeoffs, or being accountable for outcomes. If anything, the presence of AI has increased the importance of clarity, standards, and responsibility.

This shift had a significant impact on our operations in 2025. 

And it has – in every possible way – raised the bar on execution. Unsurprisingly to most, considering it has disrupted entire business models, it pushed us to challenge opinions on organizational structure, hiring, and almost every facet of how we work. This perspective has shaped our approach to 2025 and will continue to do so in the coming year. 

Attending WordCamp Europe in Basel, Switzerland 🇨🇭

In June, we spent time at WordCamp Europe in Basel alongside the RunCloud team, supporting them during an important milestone moment for the company.

Although I haven’t spent much of my life in Switzerland, I am half-Swiss (on my mother’s side) and from the German-speaking region, which made it especially enjoyable to meet German and Swiss RunCloud users at the conference.

WordCamp Europe 2025 was a particularly special one, as RunCloud announced Arch by RunCloud and opened its waitlist during the event.

Meeting users in person, including those who had recently migrated and active community members who were just learning about RunCloud, truly never gets old.

A Year of Experimentation Balanced with Relentless Focus

At its core, our focus did not change in 2025. 

Our commitment remains to delivering exceptional work across operations, growth, and product. 

Note: Ops, growth, and product = the holy trinity of ScaleMath.

What did experience some change was how deliberately we experimented within that foundation. As we do every year, we explored new ways to apply our judgment, creativity, and execution standards where they could have the greatest impact. Not in the pursuit of novelty, but rather to better serve our customers (and their end users) in a year where attention, trust, and clarity were increasingly difficult to earn. 

One area where this became especially clear was video. 

Video evolved from a complementary format into a core capability. From education and onboarding to case studies and internal enablement, it proved to be one of the highest-leverage decisions we made this year. The investment certainly paid off in 2025, and it will carry forward into 2026 & beyond.  

At the same time, we doubled down on areas where human judgment matters most.

As AI-generated content became widespread, the value of clear, accurate, human-written documentation only increased. We reinforced our belief that documentation is not a byproduct of shipping – it is part of the product itself, and one of the primary ways users build trust. 

Across all of this, a pattern emerged in the companies we do our best work with.

We increasingly partner with teams that care deeply about their users, value quality over shortcuts, and expect their partners to take real ownership. These are companies that want to build for the long term and understand that focus is not the absence of experimentation, but the discipline to experiment without losing the standard.

This balance between exploration and focus shaped how we operated throughout 2025 and continues to inform how we’re building ScaleMath going forward.

Reinforcing ScaleMath’s Core Values

Our core values aren’t marketing statements or cultural window dressing.

These are the fundamental operating principles that guide how we make decisions, how we do our work, and how we show up for customers – especially in the presence of trade-offs, pressure, and ambiguity. 

Because work, in a nutshell (and if we’re being extremely abstract), is fundamentally a series of decisions, trade-offs, bets, dealing with ambiguity, and pressure. 

As we grew in 2025, these values became increasingly important. They define the standard we hold ourselves to internally and the expectations we set when operating on behalf of our customers. They are designed to scale with the business, remain relevant in imperfect conditions, and be applied in real-world scenarios. Not just when it’s convenient.

#1 – Operational Excellence
Maintaining the ScaleMath standard.

#2 – Do it first, then do it better.
ONLY when applicable. When necessary, do not let the pursuit of excellence lead to inaction. This ultimately delays achieving the true final form.

#3 – Trust is a battery.
It charges at varying rates, but can always be drained in an instant.
Operate accordingly.

#4 – Extreme Ownership.
We take full responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks.

If something succeeds, we share the credit. If something fails, we start by asking what we could have done differently – even when the failure is not directly ours.

Our commitment is to the end customers and users above all else.

As an advisory & services business, we also operate on behalf of others. In those cases, this is also largely what companies pay us for: our unwavering obsession with doing great work valued by & for end users while simultaneously delivering the desired business result.

We are the trusted partner to take the lead on decisions and are expected to uphold the standard we would if a company in our advisory & services group were our own.

However, we must accept that we don’t always have the final say. We serve companies in our advisory & services group in accordance with their corporate governance & objectives (alongside our commitment to extreme ownership), because individual decisions may vary, balancing both protects our ability to uphold our commitment to the end user in the long term.

If this sounds like a team you’d like to join, drop us a line: [email protected]. 

Establishing Clear Brand Standards

We’re also excited to announce that we finally have a long-overdue brand guidelines page.

As ScaleMath has grown, the need for clearer and more consistent use of the brand across content, media, and external references has become increasingly apparent. 

This page documents how we present ScaleMath – from naming and usage to brand assets – so there’s less ambiguity going forward.

You can find it here: ScaleMath Brand Assets and Media Kit

The True Operators Podcast

We only managed to release a whopping 2 episodes this year, alongside our other priorities. This year, we’re going to change that. 

#1 – Should You Run a Lifetime Deal? WP Umbrella’s Lessons with Aurelio Volle. 

#2 – How to Build a Calm Support Operation with Antoine Minoux of Fernand. 

We already have some great guests lined up: 

• Jesse Hanley of Bento
• Remkus de Vries of Scanfully/WithinWP

If there’s anyone you’d like to see us interview, drop an email to [email protected] (even if that person is you, don’t feel bad about nominating yourself; this will not negatively impact our decision as to whether or not we’d invite you on).

While we’re here, I want to spend a bit of time talking about some things that you can expect to see from us in 2026. 

ScaleMath Academy

2026 will be the year we launch our first ScaleMath course (with the possibility of more to follow). You’ll hear more from us on this soon. 

For now, what we can share is that the first course will be a complete, end-to-end training – the same one we intend to use internally for onboarding new hires.

The goal is simple: document how we write & produce content. 

ScaleMath Studios / Launching Additional Mini Series

In 2025, we spent more time experimenting with video – both as a format and as a way to showcase how we think, operate, and work. 

One idea that emerged from this was Friction Log.

In one of the videos we published this year – What is Friction Logging? (+ How to Use It to Build Better Products – I casually mentioned that we will likely start a series called Friction Log in which we document friction that we come across in real products, the same way we already do for companies in our advisory & services group. 

Friction Log is the first, but there may also be others! All in all, this is something I’d be very excited to see come together. However, whether or not we will have the opportunity to execute them, and the extent to which we will see those come together in 2026, largely depends on priorities (and also managing expectations with ourselves).

While we like to push ourselves, there are limits to what we can do, and there is absolutely a certain standard that we are going to maintain before putting anything out there (be it for companies in our advisory & services group or for ourselves – obviously). 

• Friction Log: An inside look at how we identify and document friction to build better products.
• Feedback Loop: Over-the-shoulder feedback walkthroughs designed to close the loop in copy, design, messaging, and more. 

In addition to this, we also made a number of upgrades to our recording studio over the course of the year. This included improvements across audio, lighting, and camera equipment. Given the revenue video currently brings in for us, a percentage of our budget for the year is allocated to continued improvements in 2026. 

Note: Keeping a close eye on the Sony A7V for the camera enthusiasts out there :) 

These investments are about consistency and quality. Ultimately, “content remains king”, yes, and that is something we are reinforcing. However, as a company, we have a strong commitment to quality & our belief is that it shouldn’t be a trade-off (choosing one or the other).

In short: we believe in continuously pushing the boundary for technical excellence and quality in the literal sense, as this will flow downstream – reinforcing quality in the substance of what we produce and every other element of our process (particularly planning and post-production, if we know the potential of the end result is exceptional). 

Workover

Last but certainly not least, we have our software product, which I did spend some time talking about in interviews throughout the year – including this conversation with Gautam from Seahawk Media. 

We’re deliberately taking our time with Workover. As with everything else we do, the goal isn’t to rush something out, but to build it properly – informed by the same standards, judgment, and real-world experience that guide our advisory work.

This is a particular challenge as a result of all of rapid changes amplified by AI, with which we are transparently not going to engage in a race to the bottom to compete with VC-funded brands that can burn money like there’s no tomorrow. We’re 100% bootstrapped, profitable, and have built a resilient business we’re proud of. There’s nothing that’s going to make me sacrifice that in the pursuit of something shiny, bigger, or with 100x the potential if it means sacrificing my core values. 

In any case, you’ll hear more about this as and when it does take shape. 🙌

And that’s a wrap on 2025. Here’s to 2026! 

– Alex Panagis & Team ScaleMath