Blog about it when you work a 4-day week and _earn_ $4.75m/yr.
Our yearly run rate is now $8.5m+ :)
Nice work Ryan! You're an inspiration to those of us who want to produce great work and enjoy high quality of life.
We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
81–90 of 136 posts
Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Political campaigns at least have downtime though, right? You can have a month or two off between sprints. I think certain creative work (movies?) is like this too.
When I worked on political campaigns it was summer (anywhere from May to August) until election day (first week of November) for 90+ hours a week. I joke around about my very first job where I worked 96 hours in the first 6 days, and since it was July it only got busier from there. It gets to the point where you would much rather do 10+ hours of work every day of the week than take that Sunday off but have to sacrifi…
Why do people work so hard for getting a candidate elected? Does it personally benefit you or your family? I am not talking of idealistic 20-somethings but of people in 35+ age group? Why do they work hard to get a candidate elected?
In a country like India, where I come from, this is totally understandable...if your candidate wins, you stand to make a lot of (corrupt) money.
Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
#83Congratulations! 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.
Not the parent, but we pay between $1,000-$1,500 per month per employee (annually $12,000 - $18,000) for medical. We do pay 100% for great coverage for their whole families, so I'm sure many companies are paying less, but it adds up fast. That's not including other loaded headcount numbers like 401k matching, FSA pre-loading, training budget, travel, cell phone + plan, and so on.
Our office costs are generally pretty low, although if you factor in desks, chairs, monitors, laptops, iPads, kitchen stuff, etc... it does add up fast.
Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
#84Congratulations! 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?…
It's probably a result of rapid expansion. eg, they did $3M revenue over the last financial year, but only started that year with 20 or whatever employees. So you should probably be dividing by something like an average of 26 employees and not 34, which gives $115K per person and seems more in line with reality.
Usually a revenue run rate means "we extrapolated our previous short term over the next year." It's useful for rapidly-growing companies where your next three quarters are much more likely to look like your current one than the previous three.
So that would mean they're still being very economical with per-employee expenses. My guess is that a lot of those employees aren't developers, they're in other roles where the average pay is lower (support, film and video editing, administration, even some sales roles).
Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
#85Serious question: why does Treehouse need 45 employees? What's the division of labor? Are most of them required for content creation, or engineering, or what? I've been thinking a lot about company size lately, and was always impressed that not long before acquisition time Instagram had a team of just six (which quickly expanded to twelve prior to acquisition). Is such a small team size really only achievable by user…
You can see our full team, and their responsibilities here (http://teamtreehouse.com/about)
The content team (teachers, video, audio, motion design) is a sizable portion of the company. They focus on writing, producing, and supporting the learning content and video.
The app team (devs + designers) focus on things like the the web app, the learning tools like our code challenges, and quite a bit of other stuff.
We have support team members who are always interacting with and helping our students. Marketing, sales, and operations are doing what you would expect them to.
It's interesting to watch the scaling in person. When I started it was just Nick Pettit and myself as teachers ( and we did our own video/audio work), Ryan the CEO, and we had a contract dev and designer. Now it's ~60, not even sure of the exact number, and everyone keeps really busy.
Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
#86Does this include support staff? Does it not affect the quality of customer service having your business go dark for three days each week?
Support team has a slightly different schedule to make sure Fridays and even weekends have coverage. I'm not exactly sure what the schedule is, I'd have to ask.
Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you have many employees outside of the US?
Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I worked on political campaigns it was summer (anywhere from May to August) until election day (first week of November) for 90+ hours a week. I joke around about my very first job where I worked 96 hours in the first 6 days, and since it was July it only got busier from there. It gets to the point where you would much rather do 10+ hours of work every day of the week than take that Sunday off but have to sacrifi…
Why do people work so hard for getting a candidate elected? Does it personally benefit you or your family? I am not talking of idealistic 20-somethings but of people in 35+ age group? Why do they work hard to get a candidate elected? In a country like India, where I come from, this is totally understandable...if your candidate wins, you stand to make a lot of (corrupt) money.
Obviously idealistic 20-somethings make up the majority of the grunt work. Hell, even idealistic 30-somethings make up the majority of the lower-level management.
For most people who treat it as a career though, it's just a job. Rather than a 40-hour a week office job, they have a job where they work 100 hours a week 5 months out of the year. The vast majority of campaign workers I worked with in my younger days are now working in government (state and federal) so that's definitely one of the best ways to get into that work. To be clear, I'm referring to Administration-type posts, not civil service or public service positions. These are still very political jobs such as spokesperson and generic staffers.
EDIT: And maybe this is my idealism shining through (I'm still a 20-something, after all :)) but a lot of us really believe that Our Side is better than The Alternative, and we're willing to give up time to try to make that a reality. Even though I don't make money from politics anymore, I still donate a decent amount of my spare time every cycle to the candidate(s) I choose to support.
Re: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
#89What does 4-day week even have to do with the success of fund raise...? I personally think it has little. You can work 48 hours every week and manage to pull a couple millions if you are lucky.