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If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most

If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most of them that did it better with more devs/staff, as evidenced by the general lack of 1 person saas companies out there that solve more than a very niche problem.

jrockway 4y ago
What large company is beating the 5 person competitor in their industry?
- noirbot 4y ago
  Most of them? Can you give an example of a 5 person competitor competing with a large company? And of those, how many of them can only do that because they're outsourcing most of their needs to some other company people regularly complain is bloated?
  - hedora 4y ago
    Craigslist has 50 employees, which is closer to 5 than 500.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      And its lunch is slowly being eaten by facebook marketplace.
      - hedora 4y ago
        I hope this comment ages as well as it would if you had mentioned MySpace.
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      Craigslist is wildly profitable, but can't touch ebay or amazon.
seydor 4y ago
The layoffs prove them right though no? Plenty of companies seem to have had layoffs without loss of profits
- noirbot 4y ago
  Only once they lay off another 400+ people. If anything, the fact that Jack had anyone but himself to lay off isn't proving OP right. Being over-staffed is different from "one person can run this as a saas business"
tester756 4y ago
Discord had small engineering team and they outperformed Teams, Google's VoIPs, Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Zoom
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  They've been pretty adamant about not chasing after business/enterprise sales and I bet this is a big reason why. Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has way higher demands from support, higher expectations about downtime, and all the third party integration requests. It has to integrate with Jira, it has to integrate with Google Calendar, it has to integrate with this niche service that changes their API every month and doesn't care your contract with Dairy Queen relies on this integration working.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 4y ago
    Okay but it doesn't seem like patreon needs to, or is even chasing after enterprise sales? At least in the b2c space it doesn't seem like you need a huge engineering team.
    - squeaky-clean 4y ago
      I meant that in response to why Discord can be so successful with 1% of the employees of other chat products. It's because they're not actually similar products. One is for casual chat (with no pretense of security) and one is for business chat. It's not specifically about avoiding enterprise, it's about them recognizing what sort of business decisions are sustainable with small team capabilities. Enterprise chat adds a TON of requirements and harsher penalties for mistakes. In Patreon's case, it's one of those business models that a small team just cannot survive in at scale. Sure, storing some payment data in a database and charging a payment API once a month in a job queue is a weekend project. But then you get your first email about a stolen credit card being used. And one from Disney lawyers about how someone is using their Patreon account to sell Disney intellectual property. And an email from FBI because someone is using it to sell illegal images. And from creators whose account got hacked and all their payments redirected to a new bank account. Or the subscribers who want a refund because they're unhappy. Or the people who realize that if you say your credit card was stolen, you can access the exclusive content from any creator and get a refund the next day.
gamblor956 4y ago
He's not wrong. Patreon's technical platform isn't cutting edge or unique and could be replicated fairly quickly by a small team in a month or two. Most of what makes Patreon what it is comes from the other parts of the company, i.e., the marketers, account managers, etc., that bring in the actual revenue. Of course, that's also the reason why a tiny company can't just replace Patreon: it's not the tech that matters. It's the marketing and other people stuff that you just can't handle with a small team. It's not a good sign that Patreon is doubling down on engineering and eliminating the positions that actually bring in revenue. That's a sign of a poorly managed company not understanding its value proposition. Keeping extra engineers on staff to create yet another cryptocurrency isn't going to save Patreon, but the absence of the two dozen plus marketers and account managers they just fired will be acutely felt as they go into the holiday season.
- noirbot 4y ago
  Is that true? I feel like every past discussion about Patreon, as well as from the folks I know who use it as artists, they're not really getting much in terms of marketing or assistance/management. I certainly have a hard time believing that they're making most of their money from their "services" outside of just relaying money. Their discovery is pretty awful too. My understanding is that they're mostly viable because there's no easier way to solicit money as a podcast/youtube channel right now.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    That's a problem with the people, not with the tech. They overhired without training people into the roles they were hired for. On discovery: Tiktok, for example, is absolutely slaying Insta, Snap, and Twitter. Tiktok uses human curation; the other 3 use an algorithm. Note that Patreon takes a % of all transactions, so the key driver is increasing transactions. They don't need fancy new tech for that; they need more human interaction.
lmm 4y ago
AIUI OnlyFans actually did successfully compete pretty directly with Patreon for a while as a 3 dev company. (I assume they may have grown a little since then)

jrockway 4y ago

What large company is beating the 5 person competitor in their industry?

noirbot 4y ago
Most of them? Can you give an example of a 5 person competitor competing with a large company? And of those, how many of them can only do that because they're outsourcing most of their needs to some other company people regularly complain is bloated?
- hedora 4y ago
  Craigslist has 50 employees, which is closer to 5 than 500.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    And its lunch is slowly being eaten by facebook marketplace.
    - hedora 4y ago
      I hope this comment ages as well as it would if you had mentioned MySpace.
  - compiler-guy 4y ago
    Craigslist is wildly profitable, but can't touch ebay or amazon.

seydor 4y ago

The layoffs prove them right though no? Plenty of companies seem to have had layoffs without loss of profits

noirbot 4y ago
Only once they lay off another 400+ people. If anything, the fact that Jack had anyone but himself to lay off isn't proving OP right. Being over-staffed is different from "one person can run this as a saas business"

tester756 4y ago

Discord had small engineering team and they outperformed Teams, Google's VoIPs, Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Zoom

squeaky-clean 4y ago
They've been pretty adamant about not chasing after business/enterprise sales and I bet this is a big reason why. Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has way higher demands from support, higher expectations about downtime, and all the third party integration requests. It has to integrate with Jira, it has to integrate with Google Calendar, it has to integrate with this niche service that changes their API every month and doesn't care your contract with Dairy Queen relies on this integration working.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gruez 4y ago
  Okay but it doesn't seem like patreon needs to, or is even chasing after enterprise sales? At least in the b2c space it doesn't seem like you need a huge engineering team.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    I meant that in response to why Discord can be so successful with 1% of the employees of other chat products. It's because they're not actually similar products. One is for casual chat (with no pretense of security) and one is for business chat. It's not specifically about avoiding enterprise, it's about them recognizing what sort of business decisions are sustainable with small team capabilities. Enterprise chat adds a TON of requirements and harsher penalties for mistakes. In Patreon's case, it's one of those business models that a small team just cannot survive in at scale. Sure, storing some payment data in a database and charging a payment API once a month in a job queue is a weekend project. But then you get your first email about a stolen credit card being used. And one from Disney lawyers about how someone is using their Patreon account to sell Disney intellectual property. And an email from FBI because someone is using it to sell illegal images. And from creators whose account got hacked and all their payments redirected to a new bank account. Or the subscribers who want a refund because they're unhappy. Or the people who realize that if you say your credit card was stolen, you can access the exclusive content from any creator and get a refund the next day.

gamblor956 4y ago

He's not wrong. Patreon's technical platform isn't cutting edge or unique and could be replicated fairly quickly by a small team in a month or two. Most of what makes Patreon what it is comes from the other parts of the company, i.e., the marketers, account managers, etc., that bring in the actual revenue. Of course, that's also the reason why a tiny company can't just replace Patreon: it's not the tech that matters. It's the marketing and other people stuff that you just can't handle with a small team. It's not a good sign that Patreon is doubling down on engineering and eliminating the positions that actually bring in revenue. That's a sign of a poorly managed company not understanding its value proposition. Keeping extra engineers on staff to create yet another cryptocurrency isn't going to save Patreon, but the absence of the two dozen plus marketers and account managers they just fired will be acutely felt as they go into the holiday season.

noirbot 4y ago
Is that true? I feel like every past discussion about Patreon, as well as from the folks I know who use it as artists, they're not really getting much in terms of marketing or assistance/management. I certainly have a hard time believing that they're making most of their money from their "services" outside of just relaying money. Their discovery is pretty awful too. My understanding is that they're mostly viable because there's no easier way to solicit money as a podcast/youtube channel right now.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  That's a problem with the people, not with the tech. They overhired without training people into the roles they were hired for. On discovery: Tiktok, for example, is absolutely slaying Insta, Snap, and Twitter. Tiktok uses human curation; the other 3 use an algorithm. Note that Patreon takes a % of all transactions, so the key driver is increasing transactions. They don't need fancy new tech for that; they need more human interaction.

lmm 4y ago

AIUI OnlyFans actually did successfully compete pretty directly with Patreon for a while as a 3 dev company. (I assume they may have grown a little since then)