Ask HN: What are the typical user:employee ratios at various tech startups?

#1

Post by rsinmtl » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:54 PM UTC

I'm doing some research about the relationship between labor needs and user base across different types of startups.

For example, how many employees did startups like AirBnb and Uber have as their user base expanded? How many were engineers and how many were customer service people? How many exployees do B2C startups require as their customer bases grow?

If anyone can help point me to where I could find this sort of information, I'd really appreciate it

Re: Ask HN: What are the typical user:employee ratios at various tech startups?

#2

Post by twunde » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

One place that should have accurate employee data are IPO docs for companies like Google, Facebook, AppDynamics, etc. Obviously this is only available for relatively mature companies, but it should give a rough breakdown of employee size to customer count.

Re: Ask HN: What are the typical user:employee ratios at various tech startups?

#3

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

twunde wrote: post #2

One place that should have accurate employee data are IPO docs for companies like Google, Facebook, AppDynamics, etc. Obviously this is only available for relatively mature companies, but it should give a rough breakdown of employee size to customer count.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are the typical user:employee ratios at various tech startups?

#4

Post by rsinmtl » Tue, Jul 24, 2018, 3:27 AM UTC

twunde wrote: post #2

One place that should have accurate employee data are IPO docs for companies like Google, Facebook, AppDynamics, etc. Obviously this is only available for relatively mature companies, but it should give a rough breakdown of employee size to customer count.

The only problem is that the IPO filings only have information about the number of employees at filing time, but not historically.