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We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

ryancarson.com

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Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#71

Post by corin_ »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #48

Congratulations! That is a great milestone to celebrate. I was wondering about your numbers though, your post says : > $3,000,000+ yearly revenue run rate (and growing fast) > > Grown the Team to 34 full-time people and hiring > at least 10 more as soon as possible Profitable with $3M run rate and 34 people? That is $88K fully loaded per person. Can you share some techniques for keeping your burn rate so economical?…

Do you mind expanding how that >$30k splits between office and medical? Seems insanely high to me, but of course in the UK we don't have to cover medical insurance.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#72

Post by endeavor »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #48

Congratulations! That is a great milestone to celebrate. I was wondering about your numbers though, your post says : > $3,000,000+ yearly revenue run rate (and growing fast) > > Grown the Team to 34 full-time people and hiring > at least 10 more as soon as possible Profitable with $3M run rate and 34 people? That is $88K fully loaded per person. Can you share some techniques for keeping your burn rate so economical?…

My understanding from reading his blog is that everyone works from home. Which means that he doesn't have to pay for office space, and he can hire people who live where engineer salaries aren't as high as they are in the major tech hubs.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#73

Post by carbocation »

I actually subscribed to TeamTreehouse because I wanted someone to hold my hand to introduce me to iOS. It was a good experience.

For background, I've been programming for 20 years, first in Basic, then PHP, Javascript, R, (a very small amount of) Common Lisp, and Go. Given that I currently have little free time, it's quite nice to have someone show you a Good Way to write idiomatic code in a new language.

I found their (high, compared to blog posts) pricing to be a positive indicator of quality, and their videos and code seemed to match.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#74

Post by ryancarson »

ry0ohki wrote: post #70
ChuckMcM wrote: post #48

Congratulations! That is a great milestone to celebrate. I was wondering about your numbers though, your post says : > $3,000,000+ yearly revenue run rate (and growing fast) > > Grown the Team to 34 full-time people and hiring > at least 10 more as soon as possible Profitable with $3M run rate and 34 people? That is $88K fully loaded per person. Can you share some techniques for keeping your burn rate so economical?…

You are also in Silicon Valley, from what I remember Treehouse was in Orlando and Portland, I imagine Orlando especially is way cheaper on both a salary and overhead cost

We're spread out across the USA (and one person in CAN and one in UK) therefore our salaries are more in keeping with national averages instead of SV.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#75

Post by ryancarson »

endeavor wrote: post #72
ChuckMcM wrote: post #48

Congratulations! That is a great milestone to celebrate. I was wondering about your numbers though, your post says : > $3,000,000+ yearly revenue run rate (and growing fast) > > Grown the Team to 34 full-time people and hiring > at least 10 more as soon as possible Profitable with $3M run rate and 34 people? That is $88K fully loaded per person. Can you share some techniques for keeping your burn rate so economical?…

My understanding from reading his blog is that everyone works from home. Which means that he doesn't have to pay for office space, and he can hire people who live where engineer salaries aren't as high as they are in the major tech hubs.

We have two offices (PDX and ORL) but roughly 50% of Treehouse works from home so that definitely helps keep overheads low.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#76

Post by ryancarson »

wtvanhest wrote: post #16

I'm a finance guy, I don't know how to code. I signed up for teamtreehouse about 3 months ago and I've successfully been able to learn HTML, CSS, and I am starting to dive in to Javascript, MySQL, PHP and maybe AJAX. The site has given me enough structure to learn the basics while other books and the internet has provided me with more in depth learning. I wrote Nick at teamtreehouse yesterday and said that I was disa…

Thank you so much for being a Treehouse Student! We're honored to serve you.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#79

Post by bps4484 »

ritchiea wrote: post #14

My experience working 80 hour weeks wasn't with startups, it was with political campaigns where I made far less money and there was obviously no equity. Similar situation though, get idealistic 20-somethings recently out of college without families to work endlessly. I don't support 7 day weeks and 12 hour days, but frankly for politics it works. Why? Because for 95% of campaign employees it's not work quality that m…

"but frankly for politics it works. Why? Because for 95% of campaign employees it's not work quality that matters, it's talking to a ton of other people, repeating simple messages, engaging them and asking them to get involved with the campaign."

As the original author and many pointed out, working tons of hours doesn't work for knowledge workers. I think what you're pointing out here (and I agree with it) is that political campaigns aren't really knowledge work. It seems like it would be, but it sounds like a lot of the work is quite mindless.

Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

#80

Post by pitnips »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #48

Congratulations! That is a great milestone to celebrate. I was wondering about your numbers though, your post says : > $3,000,000+ yearly revenue run rate (and growing fast) > > Grown the Team to 34 full-time people and hiring > at least 10 more as soon as possible Profitable with $3M run rate and 34 people? That is $88K fully loaded per person. Can you share some techniques for keeping your burn rate so economical?…

Actually, it's most likely that software development is capitalized and amortized over the life of the product (GAAP standard is typically 3 years). Basically, accounting rules allow you to spread the cost of software developers over a few years, so the impact of 34 employees (assuming they are all developers) may only be in the $25-35k/each range
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