8 ms·

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and wh

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

skizm 2y ago
Instagram and WhatsApp (pre-acquisition) were both pretty legendary for how small their teams were vs how many users their apps had. Instagram had 13 employees, and WhatsApp had 55 employees at the times of their sales.
- julianeon 2y ago
  In Instagram's case I think it was very clear they were "borrowing from the future": they were accumulating a lot of technical debt and continuing to pile it on. It was not sustainable. The goal was to either hire more or get acquired. When the latter happened, the codebase quickly benefitted from the work of many more Facebook engineers.
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do. If you aren't borrowing from the future, you're probably wasting your initial VC investment.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do That's too broad, the hope is you're borrowing from a point in the future when you're able to pay the debt. If you borrow too much, or from a point too close to the present - though it's hard detangle those 2, then you may fail to scale at a critical time such as positive press attention or going viral, because you're paying down tech debt. From the article: if it had taken 6 months to fix their importer instead of the 2 weeks it did, the product may have died.
cactusplant7374 2y ago
Basecamp has always been a good example of that.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Basecamp has a full-sized team and has for many, many years.
  - cactusplant7374 2y ago
    It's about the ratio. Employees to users. And the profit per employee is quite high.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      That's great and all, I like them fine, but they're not a one-person-band.
      - cactusplant7374 2y ago
        Neither is StoryGraph. Original comment said: > Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? So probably pretty close when they originally started their venture.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Pinboard probably
- burkaman 2y ago
  Pinboard peaked at about 30,000 users: https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1 https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    ha! kind of funny to read the comments in this thread and see this at the top of the Pinboard website: Notice (Dec 13): code cleanup continues; please keep reporting bugs to support@pinboard.in
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Why?
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Fair point. But they were 30K _paying_ users, which is a huge difference. What's the free-to-paying users in a service like the OP's?
insane_dreamer 2y ago
While not as tiny, Craigslist has a huge user base all over the world and still has less than 50 employees total (not just devs). IMO it's the poster child of being able to scale worldwide while keeping the product highly focused, highly operational, and avoiding feature and technical fluff.
- vanviegen 2y ago
  From what I can tell, craigslist is not really a player outside of the US. Just about every country seems you have its own 'craigslist'.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    really even regionally. In Canada i've seen geo popularity across Kijiji, Craigs List, FB Marketplace, domain-specific communities with markets
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    While it's true that most countries have their homegrown version by now, I've used Craigslist myself in other countries, and it does have enough of a presence that it's actually maintained in over 50 countries which is no small feat.
    - input_sh 2y ago
      I just checked the Croatian version and it has a total of 5 things listed for sale and 3 jobs. Needless to say, there's a far more popular local alternative that basically every person in Croatia knows about (njuskalo.hr).
    - nolito 2y ago
      Well, they are present in Denmark. I only managed to find a single item - an expensive apartment. In Denmark the place to go is dba.dk or facebook marketplace. Checking the portugese version - its 3 items in Lisbon.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
grog454 2y ago
> Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well. > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never done. Whether that's because of ego or chasing local optima I'm not sure - probably a mix of both.
- cbm-vic-20 2y ago
  It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    And for all of the benefits of process, I have never met a level of documentation, verification, or testing that matches the advantages of having the entire code base originating from one mind. Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale. But there are certain applications where it scales fine.
    - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
      I don't think we need nearly as many devs as we think. We do need someone who is taking a hardline approach on limiting the amount of scope tackled at once, and then fewer devs that are downstream of that. It is hubris to think that every problem admits the same solution, namely, throw as many devs as we can at it and hope for the best. But business isn't really known for being reflective.
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      > Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale The real question here is scale in terms of what? Because a lot of folks are out here trying to scale people/careers, not software. It's extremely noticeable at BigCorps. Why do we need to scale this project from 3 -> 30 -> 300 developers? Because that's the number of reports to promo from Manager I -> Manager II -> Director
dheera 2y ago
I don't know StoryGraph's story, but it's a lot easier if: - You don't take VC money - You are okay with it not becoming a billion dollar unicorn - You are okay with occasional downtime (this isn't being deployed in a hospital emergency room after all) - You don't plan to feature bloat it - You are okay with it living its life and eventually being out-competed I had a webapp once with 250K monthly active users for several years (Fooplot). I was the sole developer. It eventually got increasingly out-competed by VC-funded Desmos and eventually got involuntarily shutdown when AWS decided to stop supporting EC2 classic instances. But I just let it be. Its ad revenue made me a good amount of side income when I was a PhD student. It had frequent downtime when people would try to export an overly complicated graph, which would crash the server. I just restarted it when I noticed. Sometimes it would be a few days later. It died eventually when AWS terminated it. I moved onto other things. Yeah, I wasn't the best maintainer, but the ~$30K I made from its ad revenue over the years was a pretty good payout for about 10 hours of work.
schneems 2y ago
IIRC urbandictionary is/was a one man show, Aaron Peckham. Deployed on Heroku https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl (post from 2014, not sure if he is still a customer).
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
It's not a small team, but Valve seems to have a very similar proportion of employees to users. I think they have about 400 employees, and a user base of 140 million. That's roughly 3 employees per million users.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  They’re running a marketplace though, and that’s a bit of a special case — obviously why VCs are always very excited for anything that is or looks like it might able to become marketplace-shaped. Certainly there aren’t 140M MAU fore the steam deck or any of the games they’ve built themselves, that’s for sure.
- piva00 2y ago
  WhatsApp pre-acquisition by Meta was also very lean, some 40-50 people total serving 200 MAU.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
PaulHoule 2y ago
I got a voice chat service for Brazil to nearly 500,000 users as a single dev. Of course we co-branded somebody else's application but I made the user database, sign up systems, contests and other web-based parts.
open592 2y ago
From a long time ago (~2009) but this comment instantly reminded me of the gem which was Plenty Of Fish https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/ https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/ "POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day"
- TheJoeMan 2y ago
  Thank you for sharing! Only issue with the article I see is that "CPM" is already "cost per mille (thousand)". So any lines such as "$15 per CPM" make me hesitate.
imachine1980_ 2y ago
Lichess is one guy for the web and server and one guy for the mobile app Cool video about the topic https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h
gwd 2y ago
I mean, SQLite is what, 4 developers? And it's by some estimations is one of the top five deployed software modules of any description: [1] https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
rwmj 2y ago
Support would be the biggest thing, especially if the website needed any kind of login, payment, or user contributions. Back when we ran a website for UK schools (so, probably 50K-100K users maximum), we only answered support calls or emails during UK working hours, and still needed a 2-3 member team doing that. That was a shoestring even at the time. Nowadays just the safety aspect of running a service for children would demand something larger.
zerkten 2y ago
Stack Overflow was an example of this. They had a relatively small dev team and they also maintained a very small hardware footprint for delivering their product. Over time they expanded their scope into products beyond the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites which seems to have increased their team size. At least a big part of their success was containing technical by avoiding product debt. They had a clear vision and very tight control of their product which is different from 99% of startups. They were experimenting but not throwing any crap at the wall which was never cleaned up or iterated on. There was a very strong product-engineering connection and alignment which is unusual. Misalignment there is the genesis of much tech debt. Many product features are thrown out with little iteration to get them right but use "shipping so we can iterate" as an excuse to throw them out to users.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ffsm8 2y ago
Whatsapp pre Facebook. It has reportedly around 50 employees at acquisition, and 450 million users at the time.
stronglikedan 2y ago
> when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes Tech debt doesn't come because the business requires more coding. It comes from poor planning and rushed implementation, often spurred by overzealous and naive management. This is a small team with one dev, so they likely do things correctly from the start and don't acquire much if any technical debt. Nothing has to be done yesterday, ever.
- hoppp 2y ago
  Exactly. Technical debt often comes when a lot of developers work on the same codebase. Everyone contributed and nobody refactors. If the project is well thought out in advance a single developer is enough and will do perfect code
- vergessenmir 2y ago
  Tech debt is a function of your code base, it's age, team turnover and number of pivots. Many factors to consider but I'll focus on pivots. You can't plan for a pivot because it's a known unknown. The same way you can't plan for a specific financial event in the market but you can brace yourself for a category of scenarios. Even with that, you can't predict the impact or the appropriate response your business needs to take. In the same way so is the pivot. The nature of the pivot is the market revealing the debt you didn't know you had. The magnitude of that readjustment to the market, in the time it has to happen and the time to the next pivot is unknowable because it's information not present at design time.
laborcontract 2y ago
Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing, distribution, that makes the business so hard. Marketing and sales, in isolation, I've had success with in prior jobs. I'm a fairly productive solo developer. However, being able to context switch and do both dev and marketing? Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it.
- RenThraysk 2y ago
  Flappy Bird had 50m+ installs.
- jezzamon 2y ago
  For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Which was all just to sit at the table for a chance at massive success. Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on. But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?
steventruong 2y ago
Eric Barone as a one man team built, designed, animated, wrote, and composed the entire game of Stardew Valley by himself. The game sold over 30 million copies and had an all time high of over 230K concurrent players at one point earlier this year.
eek2121 2y ago
I owned a website with over a million users. Used cloudflare and a $20 cloud instance to run it. Also relied on certain other CDNs. Don’t own it anymore, but considering starting a new project.
- huma 2y ago
  What was the app about?
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
Write good enough code that can be easily replaced. It really is no different than what you'd write on the job.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
Dwarf Fortress is another obvious one - basically small successful indie games are all gonna be this. But that's not a VC product market.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  If we're counting all successful indie games, we could extend that to successful modern artists? I'm not familiar but I'm sure there are some that sell a painting or sculpture for millions, though that's just one buyer. Is there an equivalent in indie Movies? Successful musicians?
noprocrasted 2y ago
It turns out you can go quite far when your objective is to solve a business problem rather than building an overcomplicated mess to solicit VC money.
eucki 2y ago
Pieter Levels is creating the kind of software I’ve always dreamed of building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg
- 0______0 2y ago
  Thanks for mentioning him. I gained some new perspective and felt inspired by looking around at his work and Twitter.
edm0nd 2y ago
>Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Tons of FOSS projects. See the entire JiaTan fiasco.
bcrosby95 2y ago
Back in the Facebook app days we had some apps with 2-8mil daily unique users on anywhere from 1-3 devs and team sizes anywhere from 2-5.
kbutler 2y ago
Minecraft? Not sure how big it was before Notch hired anyone else, but this reddit post encouraging him to hire somebody says he'd "brought in $67,903,100.72" https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youve_brought_in_6790310072_hire_developers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youv...
OJFord 2y ago
WhatsApp & Instagram were I think both very small teams with very many users when Facebook bought them (I think was FB not Meta at the time) for very much money. Which maybe goes some way to your second question, as they were slightly and slowly scaled up versions of solo serving 1M. (And obviously have continued that under FB/Meta with probably now a much less impressive/unusual staff:user ratio.)
mdswanson 2y ago
My one-person indie company released many apps, and one of them (Halftone) had over 6 million users by the time I shut it down. It's definitely possible.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  Interested to hear why you shut it down when you had over 6 million users?
jedberg 2y ago
We had ~10M users on reddit with three engineers and one non-engineer. Got up to about ~20M with five eng and two non-eng.
kumarm 2y ago
Started on Android Market in 2010. First hire (designer) after 12 Million downloads and started hiring other Dev's after crossing 50 Million downloads. Still run decently popular apps on App Store and Play Store.
npinsker 2y ago
Mobile games can often scale to eye-popping numbers. Among Us has over 1 billion downloads and was made by a single programmer. Plenty of other examples -- e.g. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.OfflineGames https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.O..., a solo dev who has multiple 100MM+ download small games.
akreal 2y ago
Telegram?
CM30 2y ago
Uh, do online content creators count for this? Because an awful lot of popular YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/whatever accounts would probably fit a similar profile. Small team, perhaps even just one person, but million of viewers tuning in every week or so. The very biggest have decent sized teams (like Mr Beast), but there are plenty in the 100s of thousands/low millions of subscribers/followers range that are operated by between 1-4 people. And yeah, games too. Quite a few big indie games have that sort of team size/setup.

skizm 2y ago

Instagram and WhatsApp (pre-acquisition) were both pretty legendary for how small their teams were vs how many users their apps had. Instagram had 13 employees, and WhatsApp had 55 employees at the times of their sales.

julianeon 2y ago
In Instagram's case I think it was very clear they were "borrowing from the future": they were accumulating a lot of technical debt and continuing to pile it on. It was not sustainable. The goal was to either hire more or get acquired. When the latter happened, the codebase quickly benefitted from the work of many more Facebook engineers.
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do. If you aren't borrowing from the future, you're probably wasting your initial VC investment.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do That's too broad, the hope is you're borrowing from a point in the future when you're able to pay the debt. If you borrow too much, or from a point too close to the present - though it's hard detangle those 2, then you may fail to scale at a critical time such as positive press attention or going viral, because you're paying down tech debt. From the article: if it had taken 6 months to fix their importer instead of the 2 weeks it did, the product may have died.

cactusplant7374 2y ago

Basecamp has always been a good example of that.

tptacek 2y ago
Basecamp has a full-sized team and has for many, many years.
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  It's about the ratio. Employees to users. And the profit per employee is quite high.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    That's great and all, I like them fine, but they're not a one-person-band.
    - cactusplant7374 2y ago
      Neither is StoryGraph. Original comment said: > Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? So probably pretty close when they originally started their venture.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Pinboard probably

burkaman 2y ago
Pinboard peaked at about 30,000 users: https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1 https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  ha! kind of funny to read the comments in this thread and see this at the top of the Pinboard website: Notice (Dec 13): code cleanup continues; please keep reporting bugs to support@pinboard.in
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Why?
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Fair point. But they were 30K _paying_ users, which is a huge difference. What's the free-to-paying users in a service like the OP's?

insane_dreamer 2y ago

While not as tiny, Craigslist has a huge user base all over the world and still has less than 50 employees total (not just devs). IMO it's the poster child of being able to scale worldwide while keeping the product highly focused, highly operational, and avoiding feature and technical fluff.

vanviegen 2y ago
From what I can tell, craigslist is not really a player outside of the US. Just about every country seems you have its own 'craigslist'.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  really even regionally. In Canada i've seen geo popularity across Kijiji, Craigs List, FB Marketplace, domain-specific communities with markets
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  While it's true that most countries have their homegrown version by now, I've used Craigslist myself in other countries, and it does have enough of a presence that it's actually maintained in over 50 countries which is no small feat.
  - input_sh 2y ago
    I just checked the Croatian version and it has a total of 5 things listed for sale and 3 jobs. Needless to say, there's a far more popular local alternative that basically every person in Croatia knows about (njuskalo.hr).
  - nolito 2y ago
    Well, they are present in Denmark. I only managed to find a single item - an expensive apartment. In Denmark the place to go is dba.dk or facebook marketplace. Checking the portugese version - its 3 items in Lisbon.
insane_dreamer 2y ago

grog454 2y ago

> Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well. > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never done. Whether that's because of ego or chasing local optima I'm not sure - probably a mix of both.

cbm-vic-20 2y ago
It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  And for all of the benefits of process, I have never met a level of documentation, verification, or testing that matches the advantages of having the entire code base originating from one mind. Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale. But there are certain applications where it scales fine.
  - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
    I don't think we need nearly as many devs as we think. We do need someone who is taking a hardline approach on limiting the amount of scope tackled at once, and then fewer devs that are downstream of that. It is hubris to think that every problem admits the same solution, namely, throw as many devs as we can at it and hope for the best. But business isn't really known for being reflective.
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    > Generally this is not tractable because it cannot scale The real question here is scale in terms of what? Because a lot of folks are out here trying to scale people/careers, not software. It's extremely noticeable at BigCorps. Why do we need to scale this project from 3 -> 30 -> 300 developers? Because that's the number of reports to promo from Manager I -> Manager II -> Director

dheera 2y ago

I don't know StoryGraph's story, but it's a lot easier if: - You don't take VC money - You are okay with it not becoming a billion dollar unicorn - You are okay with occasional downtime (this isn't being deployed in a hospital emergency room after all) - You don't plan to feature bloat it - You are okay with it living its life and eventually being out-competed I had a webapp once with 250K monthly active users for several years (Fooplot). I was the sole developer. It eventually got increasingly out-competed by VC-funded Desmos and eventually got involuntarily shutdown when AWS decided to stop supporting EC2 classic instances. But I just let it be. Its ad revenue made me a good amount of side income when I was a PhD student. It had frequent downtime when people would try to export an overly complicated graph, which would crash the server. I just restarted it when I noticed. Sometimes it would be a few days later. It died eventually when AWS terminated it. I moved onto other things. Yeah, I wasn't the best maintainer, but the ~$30K I made from its ad revenue over the years was a pretty good payout for about 10 hours of work.

schneems 2y ago

IIRC urbandictionary is/was a one man show, Aaron Peckham. Deployed on Heroku https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl (post from 2014, not sure if he is still a customer).

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

It's not a small team, but Valve seems to have a very similar proportion of employees to users. I think they have about 400 employees, and a user base of 140 million. That's roughly 3 employees per million users.

mikepurvis 2y ago
They’re running a marketplace though, and that’s a bit of a special case — obviously why VCs are always very excited for anything that is or looks like it might able to become marketplace-shaped. Certainly there aren’t 140M MAU fore the steam deck or any of the games they’ve built themselves, that’s for sure.
piva00 2y ago
WhatsApp pre-acquisition by Meta was also very lean, some 40-50 people total serving 200 MAU.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

PaulHoule 2y ago

I got a voice chat service for Brazil to nearly 500,000 users as a single dev. Of course we co-branded somebody else's application but I made the user database, sign up systems, contests and other web-based parts.

open592 2y ago

From a long time ago (~2009) but this comment instantly reminded me of the gem which was Plenty Of Fish https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/ https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/ "POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day"

TheJoeMan 2y ago
Thank you for sharing! Only issue with the article I see is that "CPM" is already "cost per mille (thousand)". So any lines such as "$15 per CPM" make me hesitate.

imachine1980_ 2y ago

Lichess is one guy for the web and server and one guy for the mobile app Cool video about the topic https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h

gwd 2y ago

I mean, SQLite is what, 4 developers? And it's by some estimations is one of the top five deployed software modules of any description: [1] https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html

rwmj 2y ago

Support would be the biggest thing, especially if the website needed any kind of login, payment, or user contributions. Back when we ran a website for UK schools (so, probably 50K-100K users maximum), we only answered support calls or emails during UK working hours, and still needed a 2-3 member team doing that. That was a shoestring even at the time. Nowadays just the safety aspect of running a service for children would demand something larger.

zerkten 2y ago

Stack Overflow was an example of this. They had a relatively small dev team and they also maintained a very small hardware footprint for delivering their product. Over time they expanded their scope into products beyond the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites which seems to have increased their team size. At least a big part of their success was containing technical by avoiding product debt. They had a clear vision and very tight control of their product which is different from 99% of startups. They were experimenting but not throwing any crap at the wall which was never cleaned up or iterated on. There was a very strong product-engineering connection and alignment which is unusual. Misalignment there is the genesis of much tech debt. Many product features are thrown out with little iteration to get them right but use "shipping so we can iterate" as an excuse to throw them out to users.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ffsm8 2y ago

Whatsapp pre Facebook. It has reportedly around 50 employees at acquisition, and 450 million users at the time.

stronglikedan 2y ago

> when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes Tech debt doesn't come because the business requires more coding. It comes from poor planning and rushed implementation, often spurred by overzealous and naive management. This is a small team with one dev, so they likely do things correctly from the start and don't acquire much if any technical debt. Nothing has to be done yesterday, ever.

hoppp 2y ago
Exactly. Technical debt often comes when a lot of developers work on the same codebase. Everyone contributed and nobody refactors. If the project is well thought out in advance a single developer is enough and will do perfect code
vergessenmir 2y ago
Tech debt is a function of your code base, it's age, team turnover and number of pivots. Many factors to consider but I'll focus on pivots. You can't plan for a pivot because it's a known unknown. The same way you can't plan for a specific financial event in the market but you can brace yourself for a category of scenarios. Even with that, you can't predict the impact or the appropriate response your business needs to take. In the same way so is the pivot. The nature of the pivot is the market revealing the debt you didn't know you had. The magnitude of that readjustment to the market, in the time it has to happen and the time to the next pivot is unknowable because it's information not present at design time.

laborcontract 2y ago

Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing, distribution, that makes the business so hard. Marketing and sales, in isolation, I've had success with in prior jobs. I'm a fairly productive solo developer. However, being able to context switch and do both dev and marketing? Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it.

RenThraysk 2y ago
Flappy Bird had 50m+ installs.
jezzamon 2y ago
For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Which was all just to sit at the table for a chance at massive success. Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on. But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?

steventruong 2y ago

Eric Barone as a one man team built, designed, animated, wrote, and composed the entire game of Stardew Valley by himself. The game sold over 30 million copies and had an all time high of over 230K concurrent players at one point earlier this year.

eek2121 2y ago

I owned a website with over a million users. Used cloudflare and a $20 cloud instance to run it. Also relied on certain other CDNs. Don’t own it anymore, but considering starting a new project.

huma 2y ago
What was the app about?

mattgreenrocks 2y ago

Write good enough code that can be easily replaced. It really is no different than what you'd write on the job.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

Dwarf Fortress is another obvious one - basically small successful indie games are all gonna be this. But that's not a VC product market.

BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
If we're counting all successful indie games, we could extend that to successful modern artists? I'm not familiar but I'm sure there are some that sell a painting or sculpture for millions, though that's just one buyer. Is there an equivalent in indie Movies? Successful musicians?

noprocrasted 2y ago

It turns out you can go quite far when your objective is to solve a business problem rather than building an overcomplicated mess to solicit VC money.

eucki 2y ago

Pieter Levels is creating the kind of software I’ve always dreamed of building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg

0______0 2y ago
Thanks for mentioning him. I gained some new perspective and felt inspired by looking around at his work and Twitter.

edm0nd 2y ago

>Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Tons of FOSS projects. See the entire JiaTan fiasco.

bcrosby95 2y ago

Back in the Facebook app days we had some apps with 2-8mil daily unique users on anywhere from 1-3 devs and team sizes anywhere from 2-5.

kbutler 2y ago

Minecraft? Not sure how big it was before Notch hired anyone else, but this reddit post encouraging him to hire somebody says he'd "brought in $67,903,100.72" https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youve_brought_in_6790310072_hire_developers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youv...

OJFord 2y ago

WhatsApp & Instagram were I think both very small teams with very many users when Facebook bought them (I think was FB not Meta at the time) for very much money. Which maybe goes some way to your second question, as they were slightly and slowly scaled up versions of solo serving 1M. (And obviously have continued that under FB/Meta with probably now a much less impressive/unusual staff:user ratio.)

mdswanson 2y ago

My one-person indie company released many apps, and one of them (Halftone) had over 6 million users by the time I shut it down. It's definitely possible.

BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
Interested to hear why you shut it down when you had over 6 million users?

jedberg 2y ago

We had ~10M users on reddit with three engineers and one non-engineer. Got up to about ~20M with five eng and two non-eng.

kumarm 2y ago

Started on Android Market in 2010. First hire (designer) after 12 Million downloads and started hiring other Dev's after crossing 50 Million downloads. Still run decently popular apps on App Store and Play Store.

npinsker 2y ago

Mobile games can often scale to eye-popping numbers. Among Us has over 1 billion downloads and was made by a single programmer. Plenty of other examples -- e.g. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.OfflineGames https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.O..., a solo dev who has multiple 100MM+ download small games.

akreal 2y ago

Telegram?

CM30 2y ago

Uh, do online content creators count for this? Because an awful lot of popular YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/whatever accounts would probably fit a similar profile. Small team, perhaps even just one person, but million of viewers tuning in every week or so. The very biggest have decent sized teams (like Mr Beast), but there are plenty in the 100s of thousands/low millions of subscribers/followers range that are operated by between 1-4 people. And yeah, games too. Quite a few big indie games have that sort of team size/setup.