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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

$411K annual revenue with a team of 6? $68.5K per employee? And that's revenue, not income?

Don't quit your day job.

Not even. Factor in taxes, benefits, office space, software, hardware etc. Most employees actually end up costing you between something like 1.2-1.5x.

So realistically, probably something like ~40k per employee is more accurate. That's not much for a developer.

Not much for a developer in the Bay Area. The article mentions 6 developers ACROSS 3 continents. If any one of them is Asia, then $40k is a very, very good income.

Don't quit your day job... if you live in the Bay Area and want to still live there.

Okay, so $40k in my local currency is 69k (BAM). Divide that by 12 and you get something like 5.8k per month. The average pay here is ~700 per month. For CS it's like 1000-1200. So, this is like 5x bigger.

And I live in Europe.

My thoughts exactly. It's nowhere near enough revenue to even keep going, unless revenue is about to expand a lot without a commensurate expansion in employees or marginal costs.

Companies have been going for decades or half a century on similar revenue.

Not everyone leaves in the Bay Area, or wants to be Google. Making ends meet plus a small profit is OK too.

I assume they're figuring this revenue would continue for a while even if they all quit tomorrow. From their August numbers their churn rate is down to 6%. Even at this rate it seems like they could make pretty good passive income if they all decided to stop working on this today and pick up a new day job tomorrow.

Holy entitlement batman! I'm sure there are plenty of people toiling away at startups making less than this!

Even so, it's not really note worthy.

Note worthy is them sharing this publicly

Aren't those other startups _also_ not healthy businesses? Where does entitlement come into the picture?

It depends what your definition of "healthy" is.

Where's the growth potential?

Not at all. He said "don't quit your day job," which is a cheeky way of saying: this is below market rate. It was a comment on the status quo; not on how things should be, but on how things are.

Entitlement would have been: "programmers deserve more than that."

Maybe he's very grateful for the high market rate many programmers can command? I know I am. Does that mean that I would advise people to go below market rate? Heck no.

Wait, why is it entitlement to want to get market rate for your skills?

Not everybody lives in the US. In other parts of the world, $411K is more like $5M compared to the cost of living.

Though this team is from Australia, so the difference will be smaller.

Australia has some of the most expensive cities in the world. For example the Sydney median property price has just hit $1 million.

Many sources rate Australia as one of the most expensive places in the world.

Here is one example:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/why-australias-st...

Actually, I would...

Hope your boss ain't reading this!

or quit your day job and try to go up from here...

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