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It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

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Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#51

Post by doh »

0xfeba wrote: post #20
doh wrote: post #12

I believe this is why Jeff Bezos has the two pizzas rule [0]. Anecdotally, to this day we get surprised reactions (mostly by investors) when they learn that our massive service [1] was built by 6 engineers. More people requires more synchronizing, which leads to more meetings and results to more time waste. [0] https://lifehacker.com/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-for-... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13…

At my last company two pizzas would be eaten by any two people, myself included. At my current company, they'd have to order 2 vegetarian, 2 gluten free, 2 plain cheese, 2 pepperoni and then for some reason 1 anchovy pizza that nobody would even touch. And it would take a meeting just to figure out the pizza order for the other meeting. Then another meeting to discuss who needs to go to that meeting.

You nailed it. We have so many diets within our company that there is no way we can go out together and everyone to be happy. Even ordering snack is a torture.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#52

Post by dreyfan »

wjossey wrote: post #28
dreyfan wrote: post #10

I run a small company of 4 people and we're currently at a $2.3M annualized run-rate. Fully remote keeps our opex very low: only about $125k excluding salaries. I do feel we've hit a wall though, as our revenue has been ~$2M/yr for the past three years with a fairly consistent team size. We have had difficulty finding the right people who can incrementally grow revenue. That said our primary competitor has ~80 employ…

You mention a few things I'd love for you to unpack further if you feel willing. [1] You mention you have your competitor's customers churning onto your doorstep, yet your revenue is flat. Is your flat revenue then related to price cuts, or do you have churn of your own that offsets those gains? [2] You imply that you think your team size may be the reason for having hit a wall. Care to elaborate on these thoughts? […

[1] We actually closed 2017 at $1.9M but we're already at $2.3M ARR heavily due to those recent inbound. It's been a fairly consistent and frustrating ebb and flow. We'll often get a new product launched and see uptake just about the time we lose a different product.

[2] I feel like we have a pretty solid model at this point in terms the steps to create a new successful product, but I tend to do all those steps and I've definitely hit the wall on not having enough hours in the day. In the past I think our failure was trying to hire people to replicate that process across new people. It's been tough finding capable people. I very often have the crippling thought of "This is taking so long, and so much of my time, I should just do it myself". This year we're switching things up to instead try and delegate my existing responsibilities as much as possible and free up my own time for new product development instead.

[3] 3 engineering (me + 2 eng) and 1 biz/sales (co-founder). Engineering/Data side is absolutely our bottleneck. I've had a lot of difficulty (I'm a poor people manager and terrible at hiring) in finding the right people. Generally speaking I think generalists with a keen eye for the bottom-line would be the most helpful (e.g. tech entrepreneurs) but those people tend all have their own startups or golden handcuffs.

My advice would absolutely to keep things small as possible as long as possible. Identify areas you can automate to free up your time, and prioritize work based upon revenue-potential. Avoid doing stuff that engineers love (let's rewrite our stack in Go and React!) and stick to your core proficiencies. Clients rarely care what technology you use, they care about whether or not it solves their problems. If you have any control over it at this point, go for clients that have a lot of money. It's a hell of a lot easier to manage one big client paying $250k a year than it is to manage 2,500 small-business clients very upset your $10/mo product doesn't precisely meet their specific needs.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#53

Post by christophilus »

maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

I had a similar experience. My first job in the industry was with a friend of mine. In two years, the two of us rearchitected an entire product line for a credit union software company-- the teller product, the loan product, the credit reporting system, the web-banking system, the audio banking system, the reporting system, an automatic updates system for the windows applications, etc. We built the mid-level service tiers as well as the UI tiers. Two people, two years. It probably wasn't the best code you've ever seen, but our new product line was the first successful deployment that company had had in over five years.

Fast forward to my next job at a massive company. My team was maybe 30 devs, and twenty testers. It took us two years to deliver two or three basic services that didn't perform well and were super complex to deploy despite the relatively simple nature of the problem we were tasked with solving.

Now, it's not apples to apples. But this pattern has followed in every job I've had except one, where I was on a small, unproductive team with an immensely bad legacy codebase.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#54

Post by l4yao »

dreyfan wrote: post #10

I run a small company of 4 people and we're currently at a $2.3M annualized run-rate. Fully remote keeps our opex very low: only about $125k excluding salaries. I do feel we've hit a wall though, as our revenue has been ~$2M/yr for the past three years with a fairly consistent team size. We have had difficulty finding the right people who can incrementally grow revenue. That said our primary competitor has ~80 employ…

Wow, congratulations! I think you've described a dream case for many people. Hope you find a resolution to the revenue wall soon.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#55

Post by quaa55 »

dreyfan wrote: post #52
wjossey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention a few things I'd love for you to unpack further if you feel willing. [1] You mention you have your competitor's customers churning onto your doorstep, yet your revenue is flat. Is your flat revenue then related to price cuts, or do you have churn of your own that offsets those gains? [2] You imply that you think your team size may be the reason for having hit a wall. Care to elaborate on these thoughts? […

[1] We actually closed 2017 at $1.9M but we're already at $2.3M ARR heavily due to those recent inbound. It's been a fairly consistent and frustrating ebb and flow. We'll often get a new product launched and see uptake just about the time we lose a different product. [2] I feel like we have a pretty solid model at this point in terms the steps to create a new successful product, but I tend to do all those steps and I…

curious as to specifics of your team/what you guys are solving? My contact info is in my profile if you don't mind connecting.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#56

Post by jbob2000 »

josephorjoe wrote: post #42
maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

I went from a big company to a small ( The biggest contributors to that 20% are (1) extra admin overhead like time consuming performance appraisals and more red tape for purchases, reimbursements, time off, etc., (2) getting blocked sitting around waiting for some person/team whose priorities are not my priorities to respond to requests for info/support, and (3) additional reporting requirements in the form of meetin…

On the flip side, when I worked at a small company, I felt like I had waaayyy to much power over the success/failure of the business. Yes, I can make an impact, but that impact could be negative; "If I fail, so does the whole company" was a common thought I had, it kept me up at night.

At a larger company, I can fail repeatedly and the machine will have my back. I find I am taking more risks at a larger company because of that.

I have some personal gripes with small companies too. Taking vacation was always an intense negotiation ("But jbob, we planned to do this work 6 months ago, if you take a vacation, the project is delayed and the client is unhappy!"). Cleanliness was a problem, irregular cleaning or I'd have to do it myself, the multinational I'm at now has the bathrooms cleaned 3 times a day and the floors and desks are cleaned every night. It was difficult to be critical of the smaller companies because I felt like I was insulting my "friends", whereas at the multinational, we guard our personal lives fiercely and have no problems criticizing business direction.

My job is not the place to do interesting things (though I am stimulated by the problems we have, even though they aren't always technical), that's what hobbies and free time are for.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#57

Post by el_benhameen »

quaa55 wrote: post #55
dreyfan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[1] We actually closed 2017 at $1.9M but we're already at $2.3M ARR heavily due to those recent inbound. It's been a fairly consistent and frustrating ebb and flow. We'll often get a new product launched and see uptake just about the time we lose a different product. [2] I feel like we have a pretty solid model at this point in terms the steps to create a new successful product, but I tend to do all those steps and I…

curious as to specifics of your team/what you guys are solving? My contact info is in my profile if you don't mind connecting.

I'd be interested to hear, too, if OP is comfortable sharing.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#58

Post by Boxxed »

pixelpoet wrote: post #5

I'm part of a 3-man company, Glare Technologies, and we develop and market two products: a high end 3D renderer with plugins for several 3D modelling apps, and a fractal art application. We do basically everything, from the online store and website to the coding and support emails. We've been fully independent since the beginning, around 2010. When I hear about the development world out there, especially in America,…

Wow, just took a look at your renderer and it looks amazing. What kind of people / companies / markets do you tend to sell to, if you don't mind me asking?

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#59

Post by Swizec »

mmanfrin wrote: post #33
maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

Even things as mundane as copy become multi-week ping-pong behemoths as 6+ different teams need to put in their two cents and tweek everything. Legal, copy, marketing, UX, product, exec. It's astounding how slow things move at large corporations.

Then again copy that changes conversions by 0.0005% can mean a multimillion dollar difference for some companies. So it’s kinda important.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#60

Post by corpMaverick »

maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

A number of things at play on large organizations.

- They think in terms of projects not products.

- The structure of the organization ifself. Doesn't lend it self to small teams.

- A lot of dependencies. A lot of bottlenecks. You have to wait in line to get any of the resources that you need.

- A lot of people offering their opinions.

- Office politics.

- Ratio between employees that can use office (e.g.power point, excel, email) vs employees that can do real work. (devs, ops, testing ). Lots of chiefs, very few Indians.

- No one owns anything. Responsibilities are diluted.

- Teams lack autonomy.

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