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Bandcamp had 118 employees total. That doesn't smell bloated to me. (Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland-songtradr-epic-184294
by matthewn 3y ago
Bandcamp had 118 employees total. That doesn't smell bloated to me.
(Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland-songtradr-epic-18429463.php https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland...)
- hipadev23 3y ago[flagged]
- sp332 3y agoSupport for hundreds of thousands of bands and their bank payouts, and millions of customers. (They also sell vinyl, CDs, cassettes, and t-shirts.) Edit: they reportedly had a good editorial team, but I'm not sure how many people you need for that part.
- armini 3y ago[flagged]
- ruined 3y agobandcamp is an ecom provider. it is their core product. edit: your product showed me a loading spinner and then crashed, so. not sure what you think you're doing
- vosper 3y agoHow is your business that you plugged different from Bandcamp, apart from being smaller? Sounds like you're both in the same business?
- armini 3y agoour platform facilitates micro transactions with minimal fees because we take away the bank burden as much as possible. We focus on the creators, as long as they create great content people will reward them. platforms turn to crap when people find the need to sell other things. why should i sit through amazing youtube content only to be sold nordvpn? surely the community can do better with micros transactions.
- solardev 3y agoKinda like Patreon?
- solardev 3y agoWhat does your app do? I don't get it. (Read the website and still don't get it)
- armini 3y agoWe’ve built a micro transaction engine that helps reconcile payments really quickly & cheaply. This means that creators from anywhere around the world can create amazing content & reward each other instead of having to sell merchandise. We’ve tested the model with two labels so far & we’ve seen it even promotes collaboration “can I pay you for this tune to remind in my track”. This could never happen on any other platform & we think it’s something special.
- alisson_dover 3y agoBecause it's a different business? No one needs to run anything. Bandcamp offers an easy way for musicians to have a fairly customizable online presence with a flexible pricing model, a merch store, and, importantly, plug into a larger platform's discoverability mechanism.
- armini 3y agoyeah but when i talk to artists, they tell me they love the process of creating music. they don't have the money or interest for procurement, warehousing or customer support. They just want feedback on their new beat...
- harimau777 3y agoI think that's probably why they use Bandcamp. They aren't interested in setting up their own ecommerce presence.
- paulddraper 3y agoThat's the idea of Bandcamp. Get the benefits of those things without doing them yourself.
- Alupis 3y agoEvery band is eventually faced with making a tough decision: 1) Do it for the love of the music. 2) Become a business. Some bands are lucky enough to do both - not most. Survivorship Bias is key here, and the overwhelming majority of bands do not make any money or perhaps even lose money chasing their passion. "Just getting feedback" is cool when you're in it for the love of music. For the rest - you do need a way to market yourself, sell merchandise, promote your next show, sell downloads or CD's, etc.
- alisson_dover 3y agoEven then, I think Bandcamp fills the niche for musicians who want to continue doing it for the love of music and want to better serve their community. E.g. they can offer downloadable lossless music for free.
- Fezzik 3y agoI mean, the big difference is I have used bandcamp and it took me about 5 seconds to figure out how it worked… I read all your info pages and I have no idea what Kuky is. The stock images with all the latin words make it seem like it is just a scam.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoWhy do you think it's a good thing for companies to run at maximum efficiency? Have some slack, spread the knowledge around, let people go on vacation, have a bench, have replacements. Have a world that's more than capital owners and slaves.
- hipadev23 3y agoIt's a SaaS. That's a 10 person team at maximum efficiency. They could be a lifestyle business with 30. They've still got 50% more headcount to reduce.
- tracerbulletx 3y ago100 person companies are really small. Some local car dealerships have 100 employees. I think these layoffs are more about redundancy at the buyer than the people not being useful at Bandcamp probably.
- heleninboodler 3y ago> It's a SaaS. That's a 10 person team at maximum efficiency. This kind of sounds like you think every SaaS business has the same staffing requirements. That's a very strange claim.
- kristopolous 3y agoA global, international marketplace with about 100,000 sales totalling $3.5 million day. If you can swing serving that from a couple hundred petabytes in your living room then go ahead.
- hipadev23 3y ago[flagged]
- bastawhiz 3y agoSounds like you can do it better. Why not whip something up this weekend? Seems like an opportune time to compete with Bandcamp.
- alexalx666 3y agocompare this to instagram before being acquired for $1B
- alisson_dover 3y agoHave you used Bandcamp? It's a way larger feature set than an iOS app for picture sharing.
- alexalx666 3y agoYes I used it, it looks like a website from 2004, clearly their core competencies can not be about building their own file upload, payment etc. but creating Customer Friendly Sexy Branded landing, working with labels etc. which they failed to do with 100 ppl
- nagisa 3y agoThis website from 2004 is more usable than many of the websites from 2023, it is clearly working well enough (or I guess those other websites aren’t doing their jobs right.)
- lawgimenez 3y agoPeople came to Bandcamp for music, not some fancy eye popping website. I'm glad they have not redesign their website.
- maybaq 3y agoI actually like Bandcamp website, its fast and efficient.
- nativeit 3y agoAh yes, the halcyon days of 2004, when websites were all…minimalist? Bandcamp has been one of the most functional and user-centered designs on the web for a long time now. They asked for far less commission on sales, and they provided options for downloading music in FLAC and even WAV formats, and were well ahead of the curve with “pay what you can” pricing. I have been a musician all of my life. I used Bandcamp exclusively to distribute my music online, and every musician I have ever known prefers it over every other option—by wide margins. Part of what we liked was how little it engaged in feature-creep and bloat.
- notatoad 3y agoit smells a little bloated there's certainly operations that are leaner than that. a little down the thread there's people saying they could build bandcamp in a weekend, which is probably fanciful but also not completely off base. just on a pure technology level, bandcamp seems like a 3-4 developer sort of project. so they've got ~110 people running sales and support?
- iainctduncan 3y agoInfra. The "non-functional" requirements are going to be expensive and need a solid team. Scaling, reliablility, availability, dealing with huge amounts of bandwidth and storage, all that crap. I'd guess a dozen infra people minimum.
- chongli 3y agoCan’t you outsource all that to AWS? Bandcamp seems like an extremely simple site to me. It has some customizable artist pages, static file hosting for large music files, a web music player, and some e-commerce features for buying music. I wouldn’t call it “one person and a weekend” simple, but the site has been around since 2007. A dozen people could have built it fairly comfortably from a basic site at the start to the scaled up version of today. 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.
- iainctduncan 3y agoYes you can, but it gets very expensive in a hurry if you have a ton of load. So one justified place for head count is to bring down AWS bills. At the beginning, it makes sense to outsource it as much as possible, and later, a developer's salary to move the needle on your million dollar AWS bill is a no brainer. I have no idea where they are in that scale of course.
- troupo 3y ago> Can’t you outsource all that to AWS? At a large enough scale you will still need a lot of people dealing with infra. AWS is not magic > 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me. You'll need 20+ people just to deal with copyright issues on a daily basis.
- mbesto 3y agoYou don't know Bandcamp's revenue, so how on earth could you smell their bloat?
- iainctduncan 3y agoSalary to ARR is only one metric for bloat. but yeah, absent that, as I said, it's some guess work.
- manxman 3y agoWhatsapp was <50 people when it got acquired for ~$19bn and they had the ability to turn on $150million in revenue at the drop of a hat. It's interesting people are talking about bloated software in this thread and their love of lean software. Large teams often lead to bloated software. On an internet with billions of users online, there's a legit argument that most if not all technology companies are severely bloated.
- psychoslave 3y agoIt’s all about the evaluation chart you take. It’s easy to pick random criteria to justify any of the following claim. Humanity is bloated. Mammals are bloated. Multi-cellular organisms are bloated. Eucaryote are bloated. Life is bloated.
- danjac 3y agoBandcamp has (or had) 118 people. Their business is music, not a chat app, so it will have different needs, both technical and non-technical. Maybe their engineering team is slightly larger than WhatsApp, but not by orders of magnitude. Now maybe their business model was flawed (I heard it was profitable, but perhaps not profitable enough). But otherwise 118 people for a global brand-recognized business is pretty lean already: I have worked for medium sized businesses around the same headcount you have never heard of, which don't even operate outside their home country.
- iainctduncan 3y agoSo we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so our expectations are a lot leaner. But at a guess, I think we'd expect that to be a 40-50 person company. 118 seems high. The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles. Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth! EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...
- ipaddr 3y agoAccounting, human resources, sales (different than marketing), managers, security, operations, analysts, C-Suit, customer service, etc not including technical teams developers, sprint masters, qa, analysts, data warehousing, networking, support, devops, thought leaders.
- iainctduncan 3y agoYeah, we know all that, I mean that's literally what we do. But I can tell you that I have seen companies with the same feature scope range over an order of magnitude in seats. There's a lot of overhiring in this business. We often look at private companies going from initial bootstrap to their first exit, and I'm telling you, those are a whole different ball of wax. They manage to do a shit ton with not very many people.
- flatline 3y ago
- 60secs 3y agoBandcamp was profitable. Clearly songtradr thinks they can be more profitable. Assuming average comp of $100k x 60 employees x 1.3 for taxes and additional expenses thats about $7.8MM revenue. Songtradr just did a series D in 2021 for $50MM and recently acquired 7Digital for $23.4MM. I couldn't find a statement on how much it cost to acquire bandcamp, but it seems this might be motivated by Songtradr being cash poor and not wanting to dilute further. "But within this discrepancy lies a paradox: Bandcamp, as comparatively threadbare as it may seem, with about $20 million in net revenue in 2022, is almost certainly profitable—based on the fact that the company has stayed lean and taken on no new funding since 2010" https://www.fastcompany.com/90951664/bandcamp-spotify-vinyl-renaissance https://www.fastcompany.com/90951664/bandcamp-spotify-vinyl-... Songtradr - 45MM revenue / 157 employees = $287k/employee Bandcamp - 30MM revenue / 118 employees = $254k/employee https://www.zippia.com/songtradr-careers-1401192/revenue/ https://www.zippia.com/songtradr-careers-1401192/revenue/ https://growjo.com/company/Bandcamp https://growjo.com/company/Bandcamp
- iainctduncan 3y agoInteresting, thanks for posting. So what could also be going on is "synergies" as they call them. It is quite possible that Songtradr has staff/functions that they think they can share across the acquisition. This happens a lot when a portco (what Songtradr is to whoever owns them) buys an adjacent company. Of course it's also possible that that it's specific places (i.e. the content) that are being gutted as they aren't seen to be worthwhile. The things is that once a company sells, it keeps the name, but can instantly become a different company as far as culture goes. If we want to complain about bandcamp being crappy to its people, the finger should be pointing at the owners (whatever round it was) who a) made the hires and b) made the decision to sell. You are throwing your employees to the wolves when you do that. Once you've sold, the decisions are now ultimately made by a new entity with new priorities (for better or for worse). This is one of the reasons I advise any younger devs I talk to to understand their employer's ultimate game plan. If the employer is hoping for an exit in the period during which you plan to work for them, you should be under no illusions that your job is safe or will stay the same, and you should be getting compensated accordingly. This is the cost of working in the gravy train - we get the high salaries, but we also get the uncertainty that comes with working in a business where exits are so frequent. The two are connected. (And I have been on the employee side during an acquisition twice now, so I've been there.)