How did we become ‘default alive’ only three years after launching while maintaining rapid growth?

We founded Onepilot in 2021 with the idea of revolutionizing customer service outsourcing. At that time, the industry was dominated by legacy BPOs, which essentially bought labour hours and resold them with a markup. We aimed to disrupt this model, making outsourcing accessible to SMBs and challenging the industry’s norms with a tech-first approach. To achieve this, we developed nine innovative products that automate or simplify the tasks traditionally handled by legacy BPOs.

Early on, we had a firm conviction that tech & AI would introduce a new dynamic in the industry. We decided to operate with a simple business model: customers pay a subscription covering account management & our platform and then pay per ticket solved. This way, whether the ticket is automated or agent-driven, we always have aligned incentives with our customers, and AI & automation isn’t reducing quality — on the contrary, it enables us to create more value.

It looks like the market enjoyed our value proposition, as we signed about 300 of the best businesses in Europe in various industries and sizes, allowing us to grow from 0 to €25M ARR in a bit more than 3 years. Building a healthy business was important from day 1, and although we raised $20M from VCs, we always wanted to be in complete control of our financial trajectory. After 3 years, we are super proud to be EBITDA positive for the first time in Onepilot history. Our approach has been grounded in disciplined growth, intentional hiring, smart spending, team empowerment, and leveraging impactful tech. We wanted to share how we made that happen and hope it can inspire others.

1. Strategic hiring and role payback

One of our core principles has been a rigorous hiring strategy focused on understanding the ROI of each pilot (Onepilot employee) we bring into the team. For us, it’s not just about filling seats, but knowing the direct impact each position will have on our operations, growth, and innovation.

• Operations roles: We can’t deliver on our clients’ expectations if we don’t have enough operations staff — these hires are critical and have an immediate payback. We hire as the business grows and track our ops efficiency to remain as lean as possible (essentially how much MRR one ops FTE can handle — this KPI grew by 300% since inception and typically is 4x higher than what legacy BPOs do, thanks to our tech platform);

• Sales roles: We expect mid-term payback on these positions. We know sales will have a learning curve. We closely monitor our acquisition cost and sales payback, typically a couple of months. We spend a lot of time recruiting sales profiles because we know that only some sales would fit our business model and player vs manager mindset.

• Tech & product roles: hiring here is more difficult because you usually don’t see any immediate payback — we build the future of Onepilot, and these are often long-term bets focusing on innovation. We usually accelerate hiring in tech & product roles on a discretionary basis when we see substantial payback from previous product releases or when we demonstrate the success of a pilot and want to scale it (like our Autopilot product).

By staying lean and only hiring when we can quantify the ROI, we’ve built a robust and efficient team that collectively delivers on our growth objectives. There should be no egos within teams, and everyone should be aligned with this strategy, as we don’t give room for comfort or non-quantified impact.

2. Cash efficiency: everything counts

Frugality in spending has been critical to our sustainability. Operating without a strict budget, we avoid overspending and question each expenditure’s contribution to growth and quality.

• Lean operations: We keep our tech stack focused and avoid piling up unnecessary SaaS tools — we also do a lot in-house when there are quick wins (for example, we saved €120K per year by building our own LMS and agents funnel vs using external SaaS. We’re about to save another €600K per year on telco fees by building our proprietary call infrastructure)

• Efficient spending: We prioritize needs over wants, using cash efficiently and making every expenditure count. No fancy hotels, no offsites on the other side of the planet, credit card issuance is limited, spending is transparent on Slack, and we avoid consultants & agencies whenever possible. We almost don’t do any ads or paid marketing.

This approach to financial discipline has helped us remain agile and focus our resources on initiatives that drive impact.

3. Investing in the team

Creating a culture where everyone feels valued and empowered is central to Onepilot’s success. When the team members think like shareholders, they bring their best to the table.

• Rewards and growth: we spend a lot of time hiring and investing in people. We do twice-per-year pay raise campaigns where every top performer gets rewarded with cash or ESOP, recognition, and promotions. Every single employee is a shareholder, and we hope that this will enable life-changing rewards for our team in the long term;

• Flexible work: everyone in our team benefits from flexible work policies and modern work culture — which is not a given in our industry. As long as individuals deliver on their objectives, we give them all the freedom they want. However, if their performance is below par, we run performance improvement plans and build an individualised framework to get things back on track;

• Passion & ownership: Our culture attracts people who are passionate about our mission and feel like actual contributors to our success. The journey isn’t easy, but we’re proud to have a team that’s going above and beyond every day;

• Empowering our agents: we built a new market category allowing agents to work from virtually anywhere on a flexible basis. This allowed us to tap into the best pool of agents with different backgrounds without geographical restrictions. The primary goal of our product team is to make our agent’s experience significantly superior to what traditional BPOs do: they work on their own schedule, can track their performance in real-time, their experience is gamified, payouts are done weekly, and their earnings are higher than what they would be paid working for a traditional BPO.

Building this culture hasn’t just helped with retention — it has fueled our growth and kept our team motivated to go the extra mile.

4. Deploying high-impact tech

There’s a lot of hype around AI, but we’ve focused our tech investments on tools that impact ops & agents’ efficiency and customer satisfaction — whether with AI or old traditional tech. What we didn’t do was deploy tech features that please external parties or make nice blog posts, but they have no impact on the business. This disciplined approach has paid off, helping us improve gross margins by 17 points in the past two years, and this is just the beginning. We built nine essential products for customer care around two core topics:

• Management tools: everything surrounding the production, from agent selection and training to routing & QA. Some high-impact features examples are our Agents Hub, allowing us to process 5K+ applicants per month automatically (and save a whooping €50K per year on a SaaS) or our AI-powered QA checking all tickets or calls going via our platform to improve quality and reduce manual work;

• Production tools: We aim to automate, or at least pre-automate, our agents’ work. Depending on our integration level (and other parameters like our AI models, volume, data standardization, etc.), this leads to lower customer prices, increased margins for us, and higher pay for our agents, as they focus on the most complex tickets.

By leveraging technology and AI, we’ve optimized processes and improved customer care; we’ve also equipped our agents with tools that help them succeed when resolving the most complex queries.

5. Growth-driven cost adjustment

Our 300% year-over-year topline growth has allowed us to support a lean but highly effective fixed-cost base. By adjusting our costs based on our topline, we’ve maintained flexibility, supporting growth without sacrificing quality. If we underperform in a given month, we’ll reduce hiring in non-necessary roles (re: we only hire in ops). On the other hand, if we overdeliver, we dynamically reinvest and hire, for example, developers.

We don’t pursue growth at all costs. We also look at the bottom line of our P&L and adopt an EBITDA-driven organization. We use multiple margin layers to understand where we deviate if we’re not on target for a month. It is acceptable for us to miss topline targets if we grow the margins and our EBITDA lands above budget. Conversely, if our EBITDA is below budget, even if our topline is above targets, we’ll re-adjust hiring and other costs. We do this exercise monthly.

Looking ahead

Reaching €25M ARR and being EBITDA positive is just the beginning. We’re excited to continue building on this foundation, relentlessly focusing on innovation, customer satisfaction, and a culture that empowers our team. We’re also looking forward to scaling our buy-and-build strategy, acquiring smaller and less structured BPOs where we can plug our tech and operations to grow margins and become a market aggregator to compete with traditional BPOs.