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Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

techcrunch.com

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Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#71

Post by x0x0 »

rtpg wrote: post #44
Nextgrid wrote: post #9

I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.…

I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator! It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non-orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank accou…

Or done financial audits. Or moved money, let alone between countries. Or done taxes in multiple countries.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#73

Post by tempsy »

harryh wrote: post #11
tempsy wrote: post #4

This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don’t see it. Also annoying to basically admit that layoffs were basically avoidable given the “strong cash position” but made anyway to give the company a little more runway. Doesn’t look too great.

$100M in annual revenue is generally considered the rough bar to go public. Various estimates put them somewhere between $30-50M in revenue for 2019. Another 2-3xing doesn't seem out of the question.

Perhaps. Moat seems really weak to me. There’s no real network effect there.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#74

Post by sk5t »

Trasmatta wrote: post #15
Nextgrid wrote: post #9

I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.…

* Product is successful * Hire lots of people because that's what successful companies do * Product development slows way down, because you hired too fast (Mythical Man Month stuff kicks in, where adding more people to a team can slow development down, if not done carefully and thoughtfully) * Notice that development is slow, so you hire even more people to try and speed it up At least that's been my experience at 3…

Hiring too much is a problem, but also bear in mind that having customers sort of gums up the works--you can't go changing stuff on a whim without communication, more careful assessment of impact, migration plans on customers' schedule--it's easier to be nimble when there's nothing to conserve.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#75

Post by tehwebguy »

treelovinhippie wrote: post #65

Patreon shouldn't have any more than half a dozen employees. But alas, they joined the VC exit cult.

This always gets said, have you ever looked at all the documentation and helpful materials they’ve put out?

If they just wanted to be a payment processing platform they would just be a payment processing platform.

Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#78

Post by rtpg »

TylerE wrote: post #66
rtpg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator! It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non-orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank accou…

If 0.1% of your customers cause 80% of your effort maybe rethink that retention?

These customers are usually top billing and are just indicators of going upmarket. They’re also probably hitting problems loads of your users are hitting and simply dropping out of the funnel from.

“Fire your users” is a thing, but at one point you gotta actually have things work

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#79

Post by justapassenger »

rtpg wrote: post #44
Nextgrid wrote: post #9

I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.…

I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator! It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non-orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank accou…

This is hacker news. Under each article you see people being surprised why companies have employees. Common knowledge is that all you need is to write some code and you can start earning billions!

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#80

Post by sk5t »

rtpg wrote: post #52
slg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don’t see it. It looks like the company's biggest creator brings roughly $5k a month for Patreon and only one other creator has their financials public and brings in even 40% of that [1]. There is certainly money to be made in that business, but…

That's not really representative. If you sort by publically available earnings, you can see 100 Patreons pulling in $10k/month, another 100 making $5k/month, then another making $3/month. the rest are private. Assuming this is a representative distribution of the top 1000 (and I bet it's actually higher!): - $10k/month * 300 + $5k/month * 300 + $3k/month * 400 - ~$285k/month for Patron just from the official cut On t…

Honestly, $600k/month for 300 knowledge workers is horrible revenue if growth and margin aren't on the right track. This is more like a "20-30 pretty decent consultants in a second-tier American city" number.
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