25 ms·

Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

• qntty 6y ago
  You'll have to be specific. Work in what way?
  • waterfowl 6y ago
    this article about how gumroad works was at the top of the front page yesterday. https://sahillavingia.com/work https://sahillavingia.com/work discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673275
  • davish 6y ago
    I believe he's referring to this article[0] which was discussed on HN yesterday. [0]: https://sahillavingia.com/work https://sahillavingia.com/work
• pickle-wizard 6y ago
  Thanks for asking this. I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.
  • offtop5 6y ago
    As long as I can Bill my hours, I don't care all that much. I find smaller or more experimental companies to be much more unstable, and in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I can save money and retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40. Just want to be done with it
    • fcardinaux 6y ago
      I wish I had thought it that way when I was in my thirties.
      • mmkos 6y ago
        How did you think in your thirties?
    • spurdoman77 6y ago
      This is sane way to think. There are awesome workplaces out there. Whether you have a shot getting employed there is another question.
    • bravura 6y ago
      If you retire at forty with a million in the bank, how do you make it if you live till 80?
      • CabSauce 6y ago
        Interest and live on <$50k/yr?
      • bawolff 6y ago
        A million in bank is like $35,000 a year in interest. Not an extravagant lifestyle, but certainly possible to live comfortably on that in a low cost of living area if you have low expenses.
        • atwebb 6y ago
          Where are you getting low risk 3.5% interest these days?
          • CleverLikeAnOx 6y ago
            I think the 3.5% number is not for low risk investing. Additionally, you would need to make something more like 5.5% to account for inflation. Still a fairly conservative number for investments in equities.
  • dbrueck 6y ago
    Similar experience here - lotsa years at startups, then something worked out great and part of the deal was I had to join $MEGACORP for a couple of years. I left as soon as my time was up, and a big part of it was due to the absurd amount of meetings. Now back at another startup (10 people), we have no meetings other than a 20 minute Monday call for some sync-up that otherwise doesn't occur naturally. It's wonderful.
    • blackrock 6y ago
      The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money. And possibly their unproven business model. Which can lead to managers making petty decisions about money and individual worth. Since not every 10-person startup becomes the next Google. Instead, most of them becomes the next Froogle, that probably shouldn’t have existed to begin with.
      • war1025 6y ago
        > The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money. I work at a company this size. We've almost gone under quite a few times. We're still here. It's an interesting way to live. It's certainly not for everyone, but you get an enormous amount of influence and autonomy. The pay isn't "great", but I make enough that my wife can stay home with our three kids and the numbers in the bank account just keep going up. Of course, a lot of that is lifestyle decisions, but working at a small company is a lifestyle decision as well.
      • dbrueck 6y ago
        Yeah, but that's orthogonal to the question at hand, no? Sure, startups aren't for everyone, just like big corporations aren't for everyone. For me, working for a /particular/ startup is unstable and risky, while working for startups generally has been extremely stable. Other people find them too risky, and that's fine. Some people love the perceived stability of a large company. OTOH, big corps are known to do across the board RIFs, independent of how well a particular division is doing. Or killing off a whole department on what seems like a whim. YMMV.
      • pickle-wizard 6y ago
  • whymauri 6y ago
    Interesting... I went from MEGACORP to startup, only for the startup to have, literally, an order of magnitude more meetings.
    • city41 6y ago
      I think it depends on the company. I've worked at two megacorps, one where meetings were absolutely nonstop and the other where I had about 2 a week.
      • kondu 6y ago
        Do you mind telling us which one each was?
        • city41 6y ago
          Sure. I had a lot of meetings at Netflix (was there for 5.5 years, left in July). I had almost no meetings at Microsoft (was there for 3.5 years, left 10 years ago). This was just my experience. These are large companies so there is really no one overall experience, especially at MS. Oh and I was an IC at both companies. More junior at MS.
  • pelasaco 6y ago
    you dont have to be in a $MEGACORP to have tons of useless meetings. You just have to move to a company where the people are proud to do SCRUM by the book, with reviews and retrospective (each one 4 hours long)
    • eastbayjake 6y ago
      Hoping this is hyperbole, but if your reviews or retrospectives are actually four hours long, you should politely point out that these do not need to be more than an hour (and many mature scrum teams do both in an hour total)
      • trustfundbaby 6y ago
        Why ... so you can be labelled a malcontent, non-team player, denied promotions and eventually managed out of the org at first opportunity? :)
        • eastbayjake 6y ago
          There is a way to give this feedback that is positive, collaborative, and highlights what a great team player you are -- the sort of thing that gets people promotions. But YMMV!
      • pelasaco 6y ago
        it's unfortunately not a hyperbole. It takes us literally 4 hours. Mostly the scrum master do it as a monologue. We all just zoom out and do other stuff. Last sprint i finished a lib that i was working on and deployed our code twice in production to avoid dying live on teams.
      • gamacodre 6y ago
        Interesting. It usually takes us most of an hour to get through our reviews, and I don't feel like we have an unusually high number of deliverables (10-15 tickets on average maybe, representing 1 or 2 larger projects and a small batch of regressions/spikes/featurelets, for a 3-dev team). Retros are taking around an hour, faster than last year by 2x but the time still feels like it's well-spent.
  • emdowling 6y ago
    I'm at a $MEGACORP and actively work to reduce meetings as much as possible. I've found there to be far less need for meetings as my colleagues are more experienced than those at startups. I can trust them to execute, make smart decisions and escalate if need be. Startups tend to require a lot more hand holding (and therefore more meetings).
  • fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd 6y ago
    What happens if you simply decline to attend?
  • crossroadsguy 6y ago
    I see startups having a crazy amount of more meetings than mega corps, especially the ad hoc ones.
  • bastardoperator 6y ago
    I work for an ultra mega corp and honestly the amount of meetings would be comical if it wasn't so monotonous. The recent meetings have centered around increasing capacity, I've tried to explain that less meetings would give folks more time to produce value, nobody gives a shit so I stopped caring too.
    • gherkinnn 6y ago
      I have come to the conclusion that those kinds of meetings have nothing to do with exchanging information, finding solutions, or anything remotely related to creating value for the customer (tm). Though I have yet to figure out what they’re really about. An easy way to pass the time? People relying on them to validate their salary? The only way a weasly middle manager can get himself heard? Cargo culting? Probably a mixture of all and more.
      • cedricd 6y ago
        I know this isn't a fun answer but in my experience it's just bad process and culture Basically nothing can be done / no decisions made without a meeting. Why? Because X number of people feel they need buy in. If you don't get them onboard and give them a chance to voice opinions you'll be pushing uphill to get work done. And meetings are actually a fairly effective way to do that -- you have a group's attention for a set amount of time. If you just sent a doc then you'd have to follow up, etc. That sort of becomes the default, so there are meetings even when that sort of buy in isn't necessary, bc meetings are just how things get done.
  • mediaman 6y ago
    I recently became a supplier to a megacorp. They'll plop a weekly meeting on eight peoples' calendars like it's nothing. I tried sending out email summaries on various projects, so they could just refer to that instead of having meetings, but they decided they would then just read through the email summary during the meeting. I am discovering that I need to significantly increase prices to compensate for the additional navel-gazing inherent in working with a large company. It's one of the reasons I still remain bullish on the strengths of small companies: large ones just begin attracting people who apparently enjoy frittering their education and talents away on pointless zoom calls.
    • ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      The zoom calls are the symptom. Meetings are a way of "doing something" without actually doing something. Most megacorps waste millions spinning their wheels on nonsense, but they're established and make money so it doesn't matter. A strong small team working on a specialized product will always win - that's why they get gobbled up eventually by the megacorps - there's no way they can compete with that internally.
      • adflux 6y ago
        It's economies of scale versus companies being too large to manage
      • sangnoir 6y ago
        Meetings are a result of having a large team (or many teams) which require work/information to be synced periodically. I have not seen a software product that can tackle this problem: I only want to see progress on team Y for delivery 1 that my team needs for delivery Gamma. Also, strong, small teams usually don't scale well - which is why they sell themselves to megacorps who can (e.g. megacorps are much better when it's time to localize to 20 countries on 3 continents and navigate the legal labyrinth necessitated. All that work requires meetings to coordinate, even if legal ends up only asking the engineer a single question)
        • 6y ago
  • tegiddrone 6y ago
    Sometimes the meetings at $MEGACORP feel like useless ceremony. However I have worked with people who don't frikken read and do their own thing. For these people meetings are where you have to harvest their attention towards the cards/issues/wiki/specs/diagrams. Still not cool.
  • sershe 6y ago
    Heh, I just go on my phone in meetings that are truly useless, especially these days when it's an audio call (my camera is off). Or better yet I can just work on something not requiring an entire brain/focus.
• ryanSrich 6y ago
  My startup, Haekka (https://haekka.com https://haekka.com) functions similarly. We don’t deal with office politics and bullshit. We only have two FTEs (founders) and 3 contractors. We’re 100% remote and have no plans on not being remote. My previous company that I sold was remote for 7 years. I don’t believe in building software in an office. We’re very transparent about our financial and business goals. My only scheduled meeting is a weekly dev sync that I do think is very helpful, but we don’t do daily standups or daily calls. All comms are done through Slack, GitHub PR comments and Linear comments. I will likely be hiring a contract python (or full stack) dev in Q1 as well as a growth marketing position. Feel free to email me ryan@haekka.com
  • dgellow 6y ago
    What does FTE means here?
    • dumbfoundded 6y ago
      Usually Full Time Employee
    • qeternity 6y ago
      Full time equivalent. Basically it means one person.
      • dgellow 6y ago
        Thanks!
    • ryanSrich 6y ago
      In this context FTE means a fully loaded W2 employee making a salary. A contractor can still be "full-time", but they aren't technically an FTE. They are a contract employee that works at least 35 hours per week, but this is not considered an FTE.
  • recursive 6y ago
    How do you avoid dealing with politics? A lot of people I've heard say "they don't do politics" are affected by it just as much as anyone else. They're just bad at it.
• dgellow 6y ago
  I had the same question in mind when reading the other HN thread. I recently started doing contracting work and would like to try working with such a team. Just thinking out loud here, but that may be a good target for a niche job board? That’s maybe already a thing.
• systemvoltage 6y ago
  Not the same but a weird one is Gore. They’ve a flat structure and no managers.
• skynet-9000 6y ago
  Userify (https://userify.com https://userify.com) is similar; meetings are rare (except probably with customers). Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with a strong bias toward the minimum number of team members for any project. Most team members are contractors, even those working on new top-secret products, which might be because the core team is small and based in Texas and most devs are geographically elsewhere. It does seem to take up some time to build trust on new commits, which is a bit discouraging at first, but reviews are usually within 24 hours. Pay is based on deliverables, not hourly or salaried, so you don't get paid for time spent learning or experimenting, but free training and classes. The core team seems a bit old school and conservative in tech choices (not much in the way of k8s, for example), and there's not much in the way of "team" tools like you might expect for a geographically distributed team, which seems to slow things down a bit and reduce communication velocity, but they're very responsive (this might be because it's a smaller, security-focused company). Also a rather complex 10-page NDA.
  • onion2k 6y ago
    Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with a strong bias toward the minimum number of team members for any project. Putting my best future prediction hat on, this means only a few people know what's actually going on. If the company grows there'll be competing antagonist efforts from different parts of the business. You'll start scheduling strategy meetings to avoid this because it's a waste of money, and that will drive away your early hires who joined because there was a culture of no meetings.
    • skynet-9000 6y ago
      That's a good point and might eventually lead to inefficiency or looser team cohesion. Management reaction to strong growth probably feels more like Apple than Microsoft, but maybe with less angst ;)
      • lostcolony 6y ago
        Not sure how influential you are, but one thing I've noticed is that when meetings start to feel unproductive, its due to one of two reasons. The first is when you have NxM meetings. What does that mean? Well, you have, say, N people representing one interest, and M representing another. You put them all in a room together. This usually only happens when a decision has to be made, and it sucks (note: it's fine if you're just brainstorming, where no decision is being made). This is a great place for leadership to exist; if instead you take the lead from N, and the lead from M, you reduce it back to a 1-on-1 meeting, and then each of those individuals can go back to their teams with what was decided, and have 1xN and 1xM communication. The other instance is where that 1xN or 1xM meeting feels unproductive. Note the nature of these meetings - they are mostly informational. They're either getting information to inform a future decision (and possibly decide on what the team's position is depending on how egalitarian the org is; I still consider these an informational meeting, since then the leader is more a representative, and trying to find out what the group believes, in order to represent it elsewhere), or they're communicating that a decision has been made. These can likely be done via some asynchronous mechanisms rather than meetings, to avoid it feeling like an unnecessary meeting (and to have documentation of the information!). If it is done as a meeting, be aggressive with providing an agenda, and ensuring only members of a single team/department/etc, and ideally hierarchy level, are included. If you have more than that, you almost assuredly are having a meeting that is 1x(N+M+...), because you're including multiple groups. And those groups have different priorities, interests, etc, and at least part of your meeting is almost assuredly going to be boring and unnecessary for them.
• stickmangallows 6y ago
  I interviewed at a company under Hall Labs (https://halllabs.com/ https://halllabs.com/). All hourly paid employees with no benefits. Not certain about their management or meeting handling though.
• asattarmd 6y ago
  At what revenue would it start calling a full company rather than just a side-project? It's a little different for Gumroad because they started as a company with an office and became this, but for many side projects, they start out without meetings, without offices and remain that way earning a couple of thousand USD per month.
• ews 6y ago
  Craigslist has (had?) no deadlines and no (formal) meetings.
• jameslk 6y ago
  I run a small B2B service/product hybrid company, DevisedLabs, focused on ecommerce in a somewhat similar fashion. Our team of 12 is entirely freelancers, from engineering, to project management, to sales. We only hold meetings when necessary (we have no standups) and meetings are generally <= 2 people since it's usually for a specific purpose. We coordinate mostly over Trello and Slack, and meetings are reserved for demos or complicated questions. We use OneNote and Notion for company-wide knowledge, planning, and information tracking. Since everyone is freelancers, most work for other clients or have regular full-time jobs. Everyone has flexibility on hours, but we try to pick those who have overlap with the team, especially for those who need to interface with our clients. Some in our team prefer to travel around, others stay fixed in a location. Rates-wise, we don't prescribe a formula for what others should charge, nor do we usually try to negotiate anyone down. I believe everyone should make the decision of what their time is worth themselves. That is one of the biggest benefits of self-employment after all. Ultimately it comes down to what that time translates into value, so that's the lens we view it through. I would say it's worked well for us, although I do see the value in employment for our most dedicated team members. Those who are truly full-time should be given full-time employment I believe, since it better protects them (benefits, unemployment, etc). Others who want to have a freelance life should be allowed to do that too. We will likely be offering both options eventually.
• fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd 6y ago
  Valve perhaps? 37signals probably.
  • TimTheTinker 6y ago
    I'd be really curious to hear Basecamp's opinion on Gumroad, and how they'd compare and contrast their own experience with it (Basecamp is the new name of 37signals).
    • chdaniel 6y ago
      Jason Fried (CEO of BC) retweeted the Gumroad post and said a few things in a tweet
    • ayewo 6y ago
      Basecamp's CEO Jason Fried actually shared his thoughts in a tweet: "Good read on how Gumroad experiments with work, structure, hiring, and compensation. Re: part time... Little known fact: I hired @dhh quarter-time (10 hours a week) to build Basecamp way back in 2003. That's all he had, and we made it work." https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1347300851631542272 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1347300851631542272
• courtewing 6y ago
  Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point. Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in public repos. Slack and Zoom are used, but if they're used to make decisions, the recording is saved for others to consume and the decision is documented on GitHub. Meetings are discouraged, but not non-existent. To give some context, I'm a manager of two teams and this week I had 4.5 hours of meetings (including 1:1s), which is pretty normal. When I was an independent contributor on a single team, I often had weeks where I had a single 30 minute meeting. In practice today, I suspect an engineer at Elastic will spend an average of ~2 hours a week in a meeting, with a few spending a great deal more than that and others spending less. This culture is demonstrated top-down and has been a common thread from the early days, through the IPO, and continues today. Edit: We also have a general philosophy of features being done when they're done rather than when we reach some arbitrary date. This doesn't mean we don't have timelines (we have ~2 month long release cycles), but if we can pair down scope to make a release, we will, and if we can't do it then we'll just move the feature to the next release instead. We've codified a lot of the philosophy that feeds into this workflow here: https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code
  • GGfpc 6y ago
    Do you hire for non senior positions?
    • courtewing 6y ago
      We do, yeah. We include "target" seniority designations in the job post titles, so if it doesn't say "senior", "principal", etc, then it isn't a senior position. We also don't (for the most part) have requirements around years of experience, though in practice there's an obvious correlation. That said, at this very moment we happen to have a boatload of more senior positions available. There are a couple less senior ones though.
  • 6y ago
• switz 6y ago
  My company is ran similarly; though I never raised VC and bootstrapped my way to profitability over 5 years as a solo founder. I provide a simple platform for people to play their friends on high quality CS:GO servers, while keeping track of their stats/wins/losses. https://popflash.site https://popflash.site If you have played a lot of Counterstrike, have real-world technical skills, and are interested in a flexible autonomous environment much like Gumroad, feel free to tell me about your recent projects: daniel@popflash.site
  • albertgoeswoof 6y ago
    How are you making money on here?
    • switz 6y ago
      I charge users 5 bucks a month to host unlimited matches (just 1 person out of 10 pays). I could charge more, but since I don't have the overhead of a large company, I can get by with less and my users get an extremely affordable product.
      • adkadskhj 6y ago
        You host the 128tick servers right? You can afford that on $5/m? I would have thought game servers cost more than that
        • albertgoeswoof 6y ago
          They won’t be playing 24/7, if you assume a paying user plays one match/hour per day on average you need 1/24th of a server per month/user. You can definitely get more than a few servers for $120/month
  • mraza007 6y ago
    Hey what tech stack powers your project, I would love to know
• urlwolf 6y ago
  We do! (and are hiring; although we are tiny!) https://datascienceretreat.com/ https://datascienceretreat.com/
  • Bedon292 6y ago
    You mention you are hiring, but don't seem to have a jobs page that I can find. I am not looking for a new job, was just curious, but couldn't find anything.
  • canarysplit 6y ago
    Hello urlwolf, I've just launched a site which has a goal to collect different companies that support Gumroad's model - https://creatorjobs.co/ https://creatorjobs.co/ Is it possible that I list your company there? If yes, please contact me with additional information - contact@creatorjobs.co.
  • pohjie 6y ago
    Hi! Second this- I don't find any jobs page as well. I am based in Asia, and will be happy to help spearhead the effort if your team ever wish to develop here. Here's my LinkedIn so that you can see if I'll be a good fit for the roles you've in mind: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jie-poh-813748159/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jie-poh-813748159/ Thank you!
• nanomonkey 6y ago
  Speaking of long shots, I'm looking for exactly this setup with a Clojure(script) stack. The alternative is to build what you want, that has been my current plan. My only problem is that I want to make everything open source, and have no idea how to monetize my work.
  • pohjie 6y ago
    You may want to look at Ghost by John O Nolan, I believe he open sources the code while the company is making a very healthy amount of revenue.
• colesantiago 6y ago
  comma.ai, a profitable AI startup that has an open source autonomous driver assistance system, called openpilot, a bit like Tesla Autopilot. they previously raised money, and is now recently profitable. very rare in this space.
• Varqu 6y ago
  Chipping in as the co-founder of a job board startup - https://swissdevjobs.ch https://swissdevjobs.ch We are: - 2 co-founders - 2 up to 4 people part-time as contractors - full remote, almost zero offline retreats - growing the user base around 10% MoM - all communication happens on our Discord server - bootstrapped, no founding It's not clear if this model will scale easily, but I can see us growing to at least 10-15 people this way.
  • sparkling 6y ago
    How do you make money? Only from companies posting jobs?
    • Varqu 6y ago
      Yes, that's the most straight-forward model - companies paying posting the jobs. You could theoretically also serve some relevant ads (products or services for Software Engineers) but the conversion would be probably very poor.
• kvz 6y ago
  I read the post as a Transloadit.com founder and found it to 90% overlap. We do have a team meetup once a year and Friday remote gaming sessions, and one fulltimer tho (out of 18)
  • canarysplit 6y ago
    Hello kvz, I've just launched a site which has a goal to collect different companies that support Gumroad's model - https://creatorjobs.co/ https://creatorjobs.co/ Is it possible that I list your company there? If yes, please contact me with additional information - contact@creatorjobs.co.
    • shostack 6y ago
      I'm not sure you should be spamming this in response to all these comments.
• joemanaco 6y ago
  I run my company in a similar way. It's myself, three employees and a bunch of contractors. ( https://asylumsquare.com/team https://asylumsquare.com/team ) We have an office, but everyone can work from where-ever he wants to (actually the freelancers are from all around the world). Since Covid hit we're operating 100% remote before most of the time we worked with 2 people in the office the rest of us remotely. Everyone works as much or less as he wants, can take days off whenever he feels like. We do have voice calls from time to time when it's appropriate, but in 99.9% only two people are involved and it usually happens when we have the feeling it would clarify faster as by asynchronous chat (for example when screen share is involved to demonstrate something). Actually I wouldn't even call it meetings because we mostly don't even setup a schedule, it just naturally happens (for example chatting about a specific topic, then deciding a call would be easier / faster). It works well for us, but I think it would be a lot harder if we were more people as we don't have anyone who organizes or manages the project and the people.
  • canarysplit 6y ago
    Hello Joe, I've just launched a site which has a goal to collect different companies that support Gumroad's model - https://creatorjobs.co/ https://creatorjobs.co/ I've listed your company there. Please let me know if you have any concerns about that - contact@creatorjobs.co.
• mikek 6y ago
  Doist (http://doist.com http://doist.com) works similarly. See https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/what-remote-work-looks-like-in-2021-and-beyond-with-doist-ceo-amir-salihefendic https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/what-remote-work-looks-like... (paywalled) for a good description of it.
• tbran 6y ago
  Just made a tiny job board for this: unaffixed.com Send new jobs to: jobs@unaffixed.com
• ignoramous 6y ago
  You'd want to survey companies that investors like https://indie.vc https://indie.vc, https://earnestcapital.com https://earnestcapital.com, and https://tinyseed.com https://tinyseed.com invest in.
• canarysplit 6y ago
  I've just launched a site which has a goal to collect different companies that support Gumroad's model - https://creatorjobs.co/ https://creatorjobs.co/ If anyone knows about this type of company, please contact me at contact@creatorjobs.co.
  • kecupochren 6y ago
    Bookmarked, hope to see it grow! :)
    • canarysplit 6y ago
      Thank you very much for the support. :) I've launched the newsletter now, so if you're interested you can subscribe - https://creatorjobs.co/ https://creatorjobs.co/