How Growing Slowly and Steadily Shaped ResourceSpace

16th December 2025

Opinion: How Growing Slowly and Steadily Shaped ResourceSpace

Dan Huby is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Montala, the UK based B Corp behind ResourceSpace.

ResourceSpace was created in 2006. That makes it older than several of today’s best-known DAM and brand platforms, including some that are often described as industry leaders.

An obvious follow-up question might be: if Montala has been around that long, why didn’t it grow into a 500-person, venture-backed SaaS company like some of the others?

It’s a reasonable question. 

The honest answer is simple: we grew differently. And in doing so, we avoided some things that only become visible much later.

This isn’t an argument against scale. Plenty of companies scale for good reasons and do good work. But after nearly two decades of building, supporting, and living with the consequences of those choices, I think it’s worth talking about what we gained by choosing not to aggressively chase scale.

We grew organically, on purpose

ResourceSpace didn’t emerge from a pitch deck or a funding round. It was built with Oxfam to solve a very real, very practical problem at a time when DAM systems were expensive, inflexible, and frankly quite clunky. Most weren’t even web based.

From the start, it grew through paying users, not investors. That imposed constraints, but constraints can be useful. We had to make the software genuinely useful and able to cope with real demands, and we had to support it properly, because survival depended on it.

We never had external pressure to “move upmarket” at any cost, or to reframe what we were building to fit the expectations of investors. That doesn’t make us virtuous; it just meant we were free to optimise for something other than growth rate.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a philosophical stance. It just felt like running a sensible business.

The things you don’t realise you’re avoiding

Only with hindsight does it become clear what that choice protected us from.

One of the first things is product gravity. In very large SaaS platforms, product decisions tend to be shaped by the sales process. Features are added to win specific deals; complexity accumulates; coherence drifts. Over time, software choices become hard to defend, even for the people building it.

We’ve been able to stay closer to our users. Not perfectly, and not always elegantly, but close enough that the core question remains: does this make the system more useful for the people actually doing the work?

That’s harder to maintain at scale, not because people don’t care, but because more voices, more incentives, and more internal structure change how decisions are made.

Ethics stay real when they’re operational

At some point, fast-growing companies face decisions where ethics and revenue don’t neatly align. Who you sell to, what you build, what you tolerate, these questions stop being abstract.

We’ve been able to say no. Not performatively, not loudly, but consistently. That includes decisions about which markets we’ll operate in and which we won’t.

I’m not sure we could have done that if we’d been answerable to external investors with a different set of priorities. Ethics that only exist as policy statements tend to erode under pressure; ethics that are built into ownership are harder to quietly abandon.

Customers feel the difference

One side effect of smaller scale is that customer relationships remain human.

Support doesn’t need to be optimised primarily for ticket deflection. Conversations can be longer. Context carries across years. Users aren’t just segments (SMB, mid-market, enterprise), they’re organisations with histories and constraints.

That doesn’t mean every interaction is perfect or every problem trivial. But it does mean users tend to feel that we’re on their side.

That’s harder to preserve as volume increases, not because people wish it away, but because efficiency pressures inevitably reshape behaviour.

Longevity is an underrated metric

In software, we talk a lot about growth, roadmaps, valuations, and exits. We talk far less about what it means to still be useful fifteen or twenty years in.

Longevity doesn’t happen by accident. It requires trust, restraint, and a willingness to evolve without losing coherence. It also requires accepting that “bigger” is not always the same as “better”.

ResourceSpace is still here and still benefitting from continuous improvement and development. It’s still used by organisations who depend on it daily. Many of those organisations have been with us for many years, in some cases, nearly two decades.

That doesn’t make us exceptional... but it does suggest that success has more than one shape.

Scale is a trade-off, not a destiny

None of this is an argument against ambition, growth, or building large platforms. Different paths suit different teams, markets, and moments in time.

But I do think the industry could benefit from a quieter counter-narrative: that it’s possible to build long-lived, meaningful software without chasing scale as the primary objective.

We didn’t set out to make that statement. We just made a series of choices that felt right at the time.

Looking back, I’m comfortable with them.