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Comment by smanek | Hacker News Reader

What's your point?

Granted, I have no idea what they're doing that requires 7 people (and only 2 coders ...).

His point is that's insane :). The general consensus on Hacker News is a good brand new start-up is 2-3 people, who are all coders. I tend to agree with this, except for exceptional projects like search engines. Most websites can be handled by a hacker or two at the beginning.

This site could be done by just one mostly incompetent programmer in short order. What the other six guys could possibly be doing is a mystery. They are probably just slowing down the one guy doing any work.

You folks may have missed the boat in assuming this is a startup. I think it's more about the idea/message/whatever.

These people have other (good) jobs. Cindy Gallop (Founder/CEO) is a (quasi)retired ad exec. Her last web experiment: makelovenotporn.com. She talked about it at TED last year. No revenue model there. Oonie Chase is creative director at Blast Radius. The list goes on.

Plus, not less than 3 people on the about page have the word "Code" in their job title, so uhh... fuzzy math.

You get it.

We also decided to launch this as an experiment as well to get input and feedback like we are getting here. Rather than try to make it perfect at launch, we'll get the minimum viable product out there and see what the world wants from it. We've already made some changes and are continuing to do so based on feedback from the masses.

Thanks!

It is about the idea/message/whatever, but it is also a startup. Currently, other than Cindy, there are only 2 of us on it full time (Jason & me), with a user experience person coming on full-time soon.

I probably should have been more clear - I was more curious about why he felt the need to bring up genders.

Perhaps to better emphasis the abnormal structure of this company.

I understand your view point. I've done a number of projects where all of us were coders/hacks and the product didn't go anywhere. It was awesome, but, no one knew about it. This is Cindy's vision so we can't very well kick her off :-)

Currently, there are only three of us on this full time. The others are part-time and great contributors to the project. We had Pivotal Labs on board early until we could find someone like Julia to join us full time. And, for some big chunks, we'll likely get them to help out again. They are a great shop.

Hi there! There are only two of us working full time on it (Jason & me, the only programmer at this point).. The site was bootstrapped by Pivotal Labs, but those two developers aren't working on the site anymore.

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