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Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

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Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#101

Post by eastbayjake »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #76
eastbayjake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoping this is hyperbole, but if your reviews or retrospectives are actually four hours long, you should politely point out that these do not need to be more than an hour (and many mature scrum teams do both in an hour total)

Why ... so you can be labelled a malcontent, non-team player, denied promotions and eventually managed out of the org at first opportunity? :)

There is a way to give this feedback that is positive, collaborative, and highlights what a great team player you are -- the sort of thing that gets people promotions. But YMMV!

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#103

Post by ayewo »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #52
fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd wrote: post #35

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).

Basecamp's CEO Jason Fried actually shared his thoughts in a tweet:

"Good read on how Gumroad experiments with work, structure, hiring, and compensation. Re: part time... Little known fact: I hired @dhh quarter-time (10 hours a week) to build Basecamp way back in 2003. That's all he had, and we made it work."

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1347300851631542272

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#106

Post by Varqu »

sparkling wrote: post #89
Varqu wrote: post #80

Chipping in as the co-founder of a job board startup - https://swissdevjobs.ch We are: - 2 co-founders - 2 up to 4 people part-time as contractors - full remote, almost zero offline retreats - growing the user base around 10% MoM - all communication happens on our Discord server - bootstrapped, no founding It's not clear if this model will scale easily, but I can see us growing to at least 10-15 people this way.

How do you make money? Only from companies posting jobs?

Yes, that's the most straight-forward model - companies paying posting the jobs.

You could theoretically also serve some relevant ads (products or services for Software Engineers) but the conversion would be probably very poor.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#107

Post by albertgoeswoof »

adkadskhj wrote: post #91
switz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You host the 128tick servers right? You can afford that on $5/m? I would have thought game servers cost more than that

They won’t be playing 24/7, if you assume a paying user plays one match/hour per day on average you need 1/24th of a server per month/user.

You can definitely get more than a few servers for $120/month

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#108

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

mediaman wrote: post #57
pickle-wizard wrote: post #5

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 addition…

The zoom calls are the symptom.

Meetings are a way of "doing something" without actually doing something. Most megacorps waste millions spinning their wheels on nonsense, but they're established and make money so it doesn't matter.

A strong small team working on a specialized product will always win - that's why they get gobbled up eventually by the megacorps - there's no way they can compete with that internally.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#109

Post by jatins »

courtewing wrote: post #42

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…

What's the performance evaluation process(for promotions or otherwise) at Elastic like? At most big companies I have seen perf to be a major headache

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#110

Post by kingnothing »

gnicholas wrote: post #85
kingnothing wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also live just fine off that amount in most American cities. $40k is basically $2,500 / mo after tax. In the Atlanta area for example, there are plenty of nice 2-3 bedroom houses for $200,000 or even less, which puts your mortgage at $1,000 / mo. That leaves $1,500 / mo for a car, utilities, and food, which is plenty doable. Rent out a room if you want to for more income.

How does this work if you have kids that will be going to college when you’re ~50? That is, how do you know at 40 how much you’ll want to spend on your children’s college education?

Either you keep working to pay for their education, or you tell them to take out loans like most families, or you live in a state that pays for education. Georgia, for example, has the HOPE scholarship which pays for kids with good grades to attend public colleges at low or no cost as long as they keep their grades up.
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