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Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

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Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#51
post #14

Thanks for asking this. I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.

Similar experience here - lotsa years at startups, then something worked out great and part of the deal was I had to join $MEGACORP for a couple of years. I left as soon as my time was up, and a big part of it was due to the absurd amount of meetings. Now back at another startup (10 people), we have no meetings other than a 20 minute Monday call for some sync-up that otherwise doesn't occur naturally. It's wonderful.

The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money.

And possibly their unproven business model. Which can lead to managers making petty decisions about money and individual worth.

Since not every 10-person startup becomes the next Google. Instead, most of them becomes the next Froogle, that probably shouldn’t have existed to begin with.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#53
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you retire at forty with a million in the bank, how do you make it if you live till 80?

There is an idea called FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early). The first half is having enough money to not need to earn again, so you are not dependent on work or others. Once this is achieved, then you can retire early if you would like. The conventional wisdom in this community is that if you invest a sum of money in equities, you can withdraw a certain percentage annually without ever running out of money.…

I'm pretty well versed in the whole FIRE thing, and find myself more or less on that path.

One conclusion I've come to is that after people "retire early", they almost never actually stop making money. It just tends to end up being more entrepreneurial stuff that they make money off.

You don't "have to" work, but you "might as well", and all the sudden you may even find yourself in a more lucrative gig than you started with because you changed your focus and found a niche you can fill nicely.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#54
post #47

My company is ran similarly; though I never raised VC and bootstrapped my way to profitability over 5 years as a solo founder. I provide a simple platform for people to play their friends on high quality CS:GO servers, while keeping track of their stats/wins/losses. https://popflash.site If you have played a lot of Counterstrike, have real-world technical skills, and are interested in a flexible autonomous environmen…

How are you making money on here?

I charge users 5 bucks a month to host unlimited matches (just 1 person out of 10 pays).

I could charge more, but since I don't have the overhead of a large company, I can get by with less and my users get an extremely affordable product.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#55

Valve perhaps? 37signals probably.

I'd be really curious to hear Basecamp's opinion on Gumroad, and how they'd compare and contrast their own experience with it (Basecamp is the new name of 37signals).

Jason Fried (CEO of BC) retweeted the Gumroad post and said a few things in a tweet

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#56
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with a strong bias toward the minimum number of team members for any project. Putting my best future prediction hat on, this means only a few people know what's actually going on. If the company grows there'll be competing antagonist efforts from different parts of the business. You'll start scheduling strategy meetings to avoid this because it's a waste of money, and that wi…

That's a good point and might eventually lead to inefficiency or looser team cohesion. Management reaction to strong growth probably feels more like Apple than Microsoft, but maybe with less angst ;)

Not sure how influential you are, but one thing I've noticed is that when meetings start to feel unproductive, its due to one of two reasons.

The first is when you have NxM meetings. What does that mean? Well, you have, say, N people representing one interest, and M representing another. You put them all in a room together. This usually only happens when a decision has to be made, and it sucks (note: it's fine if you're just brainstorming, where no decision is being made). This is a great place for leadership to exist; if instead you take the lead from N, and the lead from M, you reduce it back to a 1-on-1 meeting, and then each of those individuals can go back to their teams with what was decided, and have 1xN and 1xM communication.

The other instance is where that 1xN or 1xM meeting feels unproductive. Note the nature of these meetings - they are mostly informational. They're either getting information to inform a future decision (and possibly decide on what the team's position is depending on how egalitarian the org is; I still consider these an informational meeting, since then the leader is more a representative, and trying to find out what the group believes, in order to represent it elsewhere), or they're communicating that a decision has been made. These can likely be done via some asynchronous mechanisms rather than meetings, to avoid it feeling like an unnecessary meeting (and to have documentation of the information!). If it is done as a meeting, be aggressive with providing an agenda, and ensuring only members of a single team/department/etc, and ideally hierarchy level, are included. If you have more than that, you almost assuredly are having a meeting that is 1x(N+M+...), because you're including multiple groups. And those groups have different priorities, interests, etc, and at least part of your meeting is almost assuredly going to be boring and unnecessary for them.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#57

Thanks for asking this. I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.

I recently became a supplier to a megacorp. They'll plop a weekly meeting on eight peoples' calendars like it's nothing. I tried sending out email summaries on various projects, so they could just refer to that instead of having meetings, but they decided they would then just read through the email summary during the meeting.

I am discovering that I need to significantly increase prices to compensate for the additional navel-gazing inherent in working with a large company.

It's one of the reasons I still remain bullish on the strengths of small companies: large ones just begin attracting people who apparently enjoy frittering their education and talents away on pointless zoom calls.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#58
post #33
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as I can Bill my hours, I don't care all that much. I find smaller or more experimental companies to be much more unstable, and in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I can save money and retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40. Just want to be done with it

If you retire at forty with a million in the bank, how do you make it if you live till 80?

Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot.

This basically means either Southeast Asia, or some parts of Latin America. Asian languages tend to be extremely hard, and it might be a lot easier to sort of blend in with the populace in Latin America. The last thing I want to do in my retirement is draw needless attention to myself.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#59
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar experience here - lotsa years at startups, then something worked out great and part of the deal was I had to join $MEGACORP for a couple of years. I left as soon as my time was up, and a big part of it was due to the absurd amount of meetings. Now back at another startup (10 people), we have no meetings other than a 20 minute Monday call for some sync-up that otherwise doesn't occur naturally. It's wonderful.

The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money. And possibly their unproven business model. Which can lead to managers making petty decisions about money and individual worth. Since not every 10-person startup becomes the next Google. Instead, most of them becomes the next Froogle, that probably shouldn’t have existed to begin with.

> The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money.

I work at a company this size. We've almost gone under quite a few times. We're still here. It's an interesting way to live. It's certainly not for everyone, but you get an enormous amount of influence and autonomy. The pay isn't "great", but I make enough that my wife can stay home with our three kids and the numbers in the bank account just keep going up.

Of course, a lot of that is lifestyle decisions, but working at a small company is a lifestyle decision as well.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#60
post #46

Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point. Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in…

Do you hire for non senior positions?

We do, yeah. We include "target" seniority designations in the job post titles, so if it doesn't say "senior", "principal", etc, then it isn't a senior position. We also don't (for the most part) have requirements around years of experience, though in practice there's an obvious correlation.

That said, at this very moment we happen to have a boatload of more senior positions available. There are a couple less senior ones though.

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