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> a company on the scale of Meetup Meetup as a website and app is a pretty small engineering footprint. The fact that you think is absurd shows how much we hav
by bvandewalle 7y ago
> a company on the scale of Meetup
Meetup as a website and app is a pretty small engineering footprint. The fact that you think is absurd shows how much we have been accustomed to this "Grow at all cost" mentality.
If I had to take a guess and break down the 200+ employees at Meetup, more than two thirds must be in BizDev, community relations, and artificial management layers.
Out of the 70+ Engineering, a core of 20+ are probably really needed to keep the core app up to date and up and running. The other engineers are working on bets and new products that the company needs in order to justify its valuation and future returns.
Essentially I would say you get 90% of the product with 15% of the engineers. Everything else is small bets to justify the valuation.
- mattmanser 7y agoDon't forget the pointless reworks of the interface that happens every few years in most startups. And then you look at places like gumtree or craigslist and for these network effect businesses you realize the UX ain't worth the expense. I bet if twitter hadn't gone through their SPA/etc. iterations they'd probably still be as big today.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoMy thoughts is that to do exactly what meetup does they probably need the huge team they have, but they could deliver a perfectly adequate service for much less. We don't need all of the bells and whistles and new redesigns as long as the site works and has content. Users are more likely to leave due to monetization efforts than a dated UI.
- mattmanser 7y agoThe new rework was pretty awful too, made it much harder to find stuff.