5 ms·

I agree this sounds suspect. A lot of people don’t realize what “$14mm ARR” means. The contract, accounting and legal work alone would require a couple of peop

I agree this sounds suspect. A lot of people don’t realize what “$14mm ARR” means. The contract, accounting and legal work alone would require a couple of people. Not to mention Infrastructure, monitoring, QA, etc - all that good stuff. It costs money to generate revenue.

sbarre 4y ago
My bet is employees here refers to full-time salaried employees. No doubt they work with contractors and freelancers. The article even says they have "a few people to write content for the blog".
- tomschwiha 4y ago
  Those need to be managed, I would definitely hire someone to manage and to load off stress yourself.
  - eloff 4y ago
    Get one of those people to manage the group. You call it the lead role, and pay them sightly more. You don't need a dedicated manager.
proamdev123 4y ago
Yeah, but if those things were outsourced that would support the “1 full time employee“ claim.
brianwawok 4y ago
I mean, I run a startup not doing that much worse. I have 0 accountants (pay CPA yearly for tax work). 0 lawyers. 0 devops. 0 QA. 0 monitoring . 0 HR. I do have : 3 devs (if I include myself) 3 support (tickets) 2 other supporting roles If I coded 100% myself (which I have in the past and could in the future, it would just mean less new features) and had a way to not answer tickets (like the OP story it sounds like due to product complexity), I could totally do this alone… It’s amazing how lean you can be in SaaS if you must. Us bootstrappers know this. So much if a modern enterprise is bloat. You have how many DBAs? How many QA? Lol.
- p1necone 4y ago
  Dev and devops shouldn't be separate people anyway. If your devops person isn't also working on the product you're doing it wrong (in my only slightly educated opinion).
- psaux 4y ago
  That might be SAAS. The other side of the coin is not the same. You do a multi year multi million dollar deal with a fortune 100, don’t expect 0 lawyers, 0 CPA’s.
  - nimchimpsky 4y ago
  - codingdave 4y ago
    You hire a lawyer for that specific work. At $14M ARR, you can afford to hire one when needed. They don't have to be a full-time employee. Same goes for accounting or any other operational staffing. Part-time or project-based contracting works great for such things.
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      Right, it would be insane to have a full time lawyer (or HR or Monitoring or DevOps) at that size. At $600 an hour you can likely do all your legal work in 0-10 hours a year.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  So you are 8 people. Quite a lot different than a single person. If you had a way to not answer tickets, that means you would not offer support to customers, so likely a lot less customers would be interested to pay you. You don’t get to 14 millions by cheaping out that way.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    More like you end up with minimal staffing a la floqast for example.

sbarre 4y ago

My bet is employees here refers to full-time salaried employees. No doubt they work with contractors and freelancers. The article even says they have "a few people to write content for the blog".

tomschwiha 4y ago
Those need to be managed, I would definitely hire someone to manage and to load off stress yourself.
- eloff 4y ago
  Get one of those people to manage the group. You call it the lead role, and pay them sightly more. You don't need a dedicated manager.

proamdev123 4y ago

Yeah, but if those things were outsourced that would support the “1 full time employee“ claim.

brianwawok 4y ago

I mean, I run a startup not doing that much worse. I have 0 accountants (pay CPA yearly for tax work). 0 lawyers. 0 devops. 0 QA. 0 monitoring . 0 HR. I do have : 3 devs (if I include myself) 3 support (tickets) 2 other supporting roles If I coded 100% myself (which I have in the past and could in the future, it would just mean less new features) and had a way to not answer tickets (like the OP story it sounds like due to product complexity), I could totally do this alone… It’s amazing how lean you can be in SaaS if you must. Us bootstrappers know this. So much if a modern enterprise is bloat. You have how many DBAs? How many QA? Lol.

p1necone 4y ago
Dev and devops shouldn't be separate people anyway. If your devops person isn't also working on the product you're doing it wrong (in my only slightly educated opinion).
psaux 4y ago
That might be SAAS. The other side of the coin is not the same. You do a multi year multi million dollar deal with a fortune 100, don’t expect 0 lawyers, 0 CPA’s.
- nimchimpsky 4y ago
- codingdave 4y ago
  You hire a lawyer for that specific work. At $14M ARR, you can afford to hire one when needed. They don't have to be a full-time employee. Same goes for accounting or any other operational staffing. Part-time or project-based contracting works great for such things.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    Right, it would be insane to have a full time lawyer (or HR or Monitoring or DevOps) at that size. At $600 an hour you can likely do all your legal work in 0-10 hours a year.
jeromegv 4y ago
So you are 8 people. Quite a lot different than a single person. If you had a way to not answer tickets, that means you would not offer support to customers, so likely a lot less customers would be interested to pay you. You don’t get to 14 millions by cheaping out that way.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  More like you end up with minimal staffing a la floqast for example.