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Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

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Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#91

Post by RenThraysk »

laborcontract wrote: post #77
jumperabg wrote: post #8

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing…

Flappy Bird had 50m+ installs.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#92

Post by Feathercrown »

mritchie712 wrote: post #74
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.

it's always fear for me. I'd rather leave it commented out for a decade or so to be safe.

I'm a monster, I see code that's been commented out for more than 2 months or so and nuke it unless I know it's needed. We have Git, it'll be fiiine

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#94

Post by jezzamon »

laborcontract wrote: post #77
jumperabg wrote: post #8

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two. Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing…

For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#95

Post by eek2121 »

jumperabg wrote: post #8

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

I owned a website with over a million users.

Used cloudflare and a $20 cloud instance to run it. Also relied on certain other CDNs.

Don’t own it anymore, but considering starting a new project.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#96

Post by vergessenmir »

stronglikedan wrote: post #75
jumperabg wrote: post #8

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

> when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes Tech debt doesn't come because the business requires more coding. It comes from poor planning and rushed implementation, often spurred by overzealous and naive management. This is a small team with one dev, so they likely do things correctly from the start and don't acquire much if any technical debt. Nothing has to be done yesterday, ever.

Tech debt is a function of your code base, it's age, team turnover and number of pivots. Many factors to consider but I'll focus on pivots.

You can't plan for a pivot because it's a known unknown. The same way you can't plan for a specific financial event in the market but you can brace yourself for a category of scenarios. Even with that, you can't predict the impact or the appropriate response your business needs to take.

In the same way so is the pivot. The nature of the pivot is the market revealing the debt you didn't know you had. The magnitude of that readjustment to the market, in the time it has to happen and the time to the next pivot is unknowable because it's information not present at design time.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#97

Post by jahnu »

aniforprez wrote: post #23
myth_drannon wrote: post #11

The app is hugged to death by HN...

I don't think that's the case. I've found it to be fairly janky and it has frequent down times every so often. I'm much more inspired to give a small one-person team some leeway about it though for a free app vs. Amazon and all its resources not even bothering to properly maintain Goodreads.

Amazon don’t even properly maintain their Prime Video app for TVs. It’s so bad on my good LG TV that I gave up waiting three seconds for button presses to register while trying to start watching their billion dollar show they kept urging me to watch.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#99

Post by radlad »

Feathercrown wrote: post #92
mritchie712 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's always fear for me. I'd rather leave it commented out for a decade or so to be safe.

I'm a monster, I see code that's been commented out for more than 2 months or so and nuke it unless I know it's needed. We have Git, it'll be fiiine

Right. The only time I sometimes leave a commented out line of code is if it's temporarily broken and will be uncommented soon; or if it's by-far the most obvious way to do something, but does not work for some reason, and then there's a comment above about why not above.

Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]

#100

Post by mattgreenrocks »

jumperabg wrote: post #8

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

Write good enough code that can be easily replaced. It really is no different than what you'd write on the job.
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