Live data from Hacker News

No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

sahillavingia.com

201–210 of 543 posts

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#201
post #175

One thing I find a bit strange about this (as a Gumroad user) is that Gumroad employees don't seem to be granted @gumroad.com email addresses -- when I've needed to email their engineering staff or marketing staff I often get replies from someone's personal email address. The fact that employees are using their personal email address to do Gumroad business makes me feel a bit uncertain about how securely my informati…

> The fact that employees are using their personal email address to do Gumroad business makes me feel a bit uncertain about how securely my information / my customers' information is being stored. I know there is a legal thing in some countries where ext contractors must have a different email. Normally this is done by creating a new domain for the contractors or a sub-domain but Gumroad could be that new they haven'…

I truly doubt that's the case: absolutely none of the contractors employed by the global-brand investment bank I work for use e-mail addresses that are any different than those of the FTEs.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#203
Gumroad is basically feature complete. I use it to support content creators (about 300 purchases or so), and never found the website to be particularily cool or useful. Search sucks most of the time. At least it doesn't get in the way, well unless it does: They have this feature to archive an item in your library, and then it disappears from your library, and you have to dig it out again. Funny thing is: when you hoover over an item in your library, a menu appears, and the archive entry is exactly positioned in the middle. So if I try to select an entry by left-clicking it I often hit the archive button. lol. Also download sucked for a very long time (dl from europe was slow and completely downloading everything in one archive wasn't supported for a long time). So yeah, it's good enough at least it's a way to more-or-less-directly support content creators.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#205

Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I wrote Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company back in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733 Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!

I'm really interested in reducing meetings by writing more, can you give some insights on how you do it ? Thanks !

I'm sure there are specifics for Gumroad, but there are lots of insights available via other remote companies:

https://blog.doist.com/asynchronous-communication/

https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-work-asynchronously/

Basically instead of waiting for a meeting to communicate, just write it down and send it out, via Slack or whatever. People can consume it on their own time.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#206

I feel about this company the same way as I feel about driving Uber. If you already have someone in your family who's making money and has benefits, driving it could be a fun way to make a few extra bucks and talk to a few people. So if you're a housewife with a few free hours while the kids are at school, or a bored retiree, by all means drive Uber/work for this place. If you're someone in their prime and have to be…

Point out the Uber drivers making $10K/mo for quarter time work. Otherwise this argument falls flat.

Is it the guy who was making 400k at Amazon? Paying someone a quarter of what they are "worth" isn't that great a trick.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#207
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your underlying assumption is that companies where employees work more hours are more successful on the market place. I would say this is a deeply flawed assumption.

If two equally capable entities are competing, the one who puts in more time will almost always win. The Chinese may be lacking the (social and physical) infrastructure that the Europeans have a head start on for productivity, but they are catching up or have already caught up. This probably applies less to big conglomerates who exist and will continue existing regardless of what happens (honestly most of their emplo…

No.

I can guarantee you that in general in software engineering, you will produce the same result, whether you work 30 or 40 or 60 hr a week. The productive hours will be the same as you just have so much focused hours inside of you.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I own a SaaS business and also sell my own products on Gumroad itself. In fact, the latter was my biggest income source in 2020 — $282K sales last year: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888186762678274

And you are not even 26? Congrats man, you made it :) That's more than I ever made in my life (close to 40).

That is OP , not the person you are answering to

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I own a SaaS business and also sell my own products on Gumroad itself. In fact, the latter was my biggest income source in 2020 — $282K sales last year: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888186762678274

And you are not even 26? Congrats man, you made it :) That's more than I ever made in my life (close to 40).

The person who is under 26 is not the same person who posted their rates.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I own a SaaS business and also sell my own products on Gumroad itself. In fact, the latter was my biggest income source in 2020 — $282K sales last year: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888186762678274

And you are not even 26? Congrats man, you made it :) That's more than I ever made in my life (close to 40).

I think the parent OP is different than Daniel. Daniel worked at Amazon / AWS for 8 years

https://dvassallo.medium.com/only-intrinsic-motivation-lasts...

Post reply on HN