Nadia does a great weekly dev log email that I enjoy as well. I highly recommend it -> https://buttondown.com/nodunayo
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]
#32Pretty 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?
IIRC urbandictionary is/was a one man show,
Aaron Peckham. Deployed on Heroku https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl (post from 2014, not sure if he is still a customer).
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#33Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#34Looks like a pretty cool app! "Amazon-free Goodreads" is a pretty good pitch. I'm curious how freemium model works out for them though, I could imagine a lot of people thinking the free version is good enough for them.
I think they do around $500k+ a year based on the numbers they have shared in a few spots. The new giveaway platform for authors should help jump that revenue up too.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#35I always wonder, how do sites like this get their list of books and book metadata? Do publishers have an API? What about Amazon?
https://openlibrary.org/ has a pretty good set of data and a decent API. You can mix and match too, since openlibraries covers kinda suck half the time.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#36Looks like a pretty cool app! "Amazon-free Goodreads" is a pretty good pitch. I'm curious how freemium model works out for them though, I could imagine a lot of people thinking the free version is good enough for them.
I am curious of more about the business as well, but I imagine even a very small proportion of paying users could be sufficient to maintain a 3-people team with that scale
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Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#37I always wonder, how do sites like this get their list of books and book metadata? Do publishers have an API? What about Amazon?
It is so bad!!!
I use Nielsen's API, but the data is pretty rough, and you have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. Plus, the archaic industry standards around genre are hard to translate to what readers use - https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list.
Ingrams and Bowker are the other big metadata providers. Ingram's is good but expensive, but the data faces the same issues.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
While not as tiny, Craigslist has a huge user base all over the world and still has less than 50 employees total (not just devs). IMO it's the poster child of being able to scale worldwide while keeping the product highly focused, highly operational, and avoiding feature and technical fluff.
From what I can tell, craigslist is not really a player outside of the US. Just about every country seems you have its own 'craigslist'.
really even regionally. In Canada i've seen geo popularity across Kijiji, Craigs List, FB Marketplace, domain-specific communities with markets
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#39Pretty 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?
> Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well. > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never…
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.
Re: Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]
#40Pretty 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?
> Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well. > when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never…
I go further and simplify: "delete code" whenever and where possible. The term "Tech Debt" is really overloaded; I think the idea that "all code is liability" is better for framing the issue and strategies.