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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

sahillavingia.com

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

#291

Post by brianwawok »

kgin wrote: post #266
gkoberger wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it have to be "sustainable"? It wouldn't work for Google, but it works for Gumroad (and, like they said, most open source projects). Gumroad is a pretty simple site (and I don't mean that as an insult). They don't deal with huge customers, sales processes, large data, complicated tech, etc. Most "hard" things can be outsourced to a SaaS tool. So why overcomplicate things?

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

You say that, but the other side of this argument is having to rebuild every. Single. Part. Of a program because nothing was designed with forethought and scalability in mind.

Great code is both simple and has the ability to scale if needed in the future.

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

#292

Post by nerdponx »

tosh wrote: post #2

anti-overtime, interesting! > We also have an “anti-overtime” rate: past twenty hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This allows us to have a high hourly rate for the highest leverage work and also allows people to work more per week if they wish.

This sounds like a nice way to make damn sure that you never have to pay benefits.

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

#293

Post by cortesoft »

dkdk8283 wrote: post #43
ska wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Process is one of those things you have whether you think about it or not. It's up to you collectively to decide if it is BS or not, too heavy, too light, etc. I'm not suggesting everyone has the influence to change process much at the place they work, but they idea that there is a single "thing" called process and some places have it and some don't is just dangerously misleading. It is true that process tends to nat…

> but they idea that there is a single "thing" called process and some places have it and some don't is just dangerously misleading. Is that what I said? No. I got into computers because I dislike people: leave me alone and let me work.

Ok, then go off and work alone on your own projects. No one is going to bug you if you are working alone.

If you want someone to pay you, though, you are going to have to let those people have a say in what you do.

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

#294

Post by [deleted] »

oliyoung wrote: post #270
DVassallo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work quarter-time at Gumroad, and I pay for my own health insurance ($950/mo for a family of 4). If Gumroad offered it, I would almost certainly still keep my own (unless it was at >50% discount). I prefer not having my health insurance tied to one source of income.

It's hard to explain just how alien "I prefer not having my health insurance tied to one source of income" sounds to the rest of the world, the idea that those two things are co-dependent is wild and scary. It's an insurance policy, it has nothing to do with my work.

[deleted]

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

#295

Post by biztos »

jfengel wrote: post #83
philmcp wrote: post #44

In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week... So much so, I'm about to launch a website lis…

Some of it is a quirk of the American health care system. Your health care costs the same regardless of your work hours, and it's a significant fraction of compensation. If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary. (Assuming you were linearly productive, which it's not, but it's the same assumption you were making and is good enough for this illustration.) There are oth…

I don't think that's a quirk. In Germany the public health insurance is based on your salary, but private insurance is not -- and independent contractors (such as everyone working for Gumroad) are required to use the private option.

From the private insurer's point of view, it would be crazy to charge more or less based on how much someone works or earns. The public insurance does so out of a solidarity imperative coming from the government, and is subsidized as needed to make that possible.

In the US, there is no public option. Feature working as designed, for better or worse.

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

#296

Post by brianwawok »

nemothekid wrote: post #154
mperham wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If you have good growth at the beginning (not hyper), you can afford to bootstrap without any VC at all. To me, VC money pays for marketing spend, most of which is ineffectual. Be hyper-focused on putting out the best possible product and let it sell itself.

How do you pay engineers? This only makes sense if you have the talent to bootstrap by building everything yourself.

Knowing how to code sure helps bootstrapping! I’m not sure how else I would have been able to get a SaaS to 7 figures bootstrapping.

Maybe the second best path would be a very high paying job (lawyer?) that can afford to pay a developer or two to get the MVP going. But you have the fun risk of “how do you judge the code being made if you don’t code”

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

#297

Post by peter303 »

rablackburn wrote: post #283
callmeed wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I make more than enough to afford proper health insurance on the open market. Everyone at Gumroad is paid very well and should be able to afford the same. This might be true for everyone at Gumroad , but I wouldn't be so sure. You also seem dismissive (probably unintentionally) of one of the biggest problems we have in the US right now: health care and insurance is ridiculously expensive–especially for people with…

> Imaging paying 10%+ of your salary just for health insurance I decided to actually look at my budget from the last year and see how this compares to my costs. In Australia I pay about ~28% of my salary in tax. 2% is for medicare, and I have private health insurance on top of that for roughly the same cost again (for dental, which isn't covered in our system because of dentists lobbying an exception back in the 80s)…

In the US a good chuck of federal & state taxes go to government employee health care, active soldier & veteran health care. This added to medicare tax and health care premiums and medical expenditures gets me fairly close to the 18% of US GDP spent in the medical sector.

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

#298

Post by LilBytes »

poorman wrote: post #121
_2d30 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to provide any additional clarity on "very competitive rates as contractors"? I understand if not but would be useful to help some of us externally think about this model.

People don't realize that as a contractor, you can write off the room you're using for your office. As a remote employee you cannot. For people living in high rent areas, that's significant.

You can in Australia. I am and have done so for many years. This was also the case prior to Covid. The tax office did make some changes last year to make it easier for people to write off certain expenses when working from home. [1]

These changes did not impact me though however, as the new "quick and efficent" method still provided me with a much smaller tax return than documenting all of my own costs. [2]

[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-deductions/Ded...

[3] https://www.ato.gov.au/General/COVID-19/Support-for-individu...

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

#300

Post by heliodor »

sahillavingia wrote: post #20

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!

It strikes me how atypical your landing pages are. I can't imagine that it converts into signups as well as it could. The front page offers little of substance. I'm curious if this is the result of testing multiple designs or if little effort has gone into optimizing so far?
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