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> We have a few thousand users > If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much
by dmitriid 4y ago
> We have a few thousand users
> If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much
Two orders of magnitude would land you with a few hundred thousand users.
Uber has ~93 million users in 80 countries.
Just supporting payments in all those countries is a full-time job for a dedicated team.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI suspect it also means our unit economics are several orders of magnitude better than Uber's.
- dmitriid 4y agoIt doesn't. Your unit is tiny. A few thousand users doesn't even break the threshold of "death by Hacker News". Uber's 93 million in 80 countries means that (very roughly) in each country they have three orders of magnitude more users than you: 93 mln/80 countries = 1+ mln in each country = 1000 times more than you = 3 orders of magnitude. As I said, just dealing with payments in each country is often a full-time job for a dedicated tema even if you process payments through a third party like Adyen. Are Uber operating at 100% efficiency? Hell no. Will you have several orders of magnitudes fewer people than Uber when you grow to Uber's size? I very highly doubt it. Of course, there are exceptions like WhatsApp, but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale), and was (and still is) very slow in rolling out features.
- moralestapia 4y ago>but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale) What makes it particularly hard to scale?