I've seen similar comments about companies like Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, and even Facebook and I'm really in awe of how completely out of touch with the reality of what it takes to run a global business with millions of users and customers people have to be to suggest these things.
Do people imagine you can just take the UI, have a few people wire it up to scale in "the cloud" and basically call it a day?
Now granted that's more than five people, but that was a planet sized service. Say you're a company that's worth 10 million or 50 million with a proportionate amount of complexity, you ought to be able to built that with a team of 10 people if you chose your software stack wisely.
Paul Graham has an older piece about Lisp and beating large companies by having a technological edge. Picking your software and understanding architecture can be very important. I have seen Clojure teams of smart engineers in particular in distributed / concurrent systems (the sort of thing that can produce a lot of value) who do as much work in a team of 5 as a big corporate Java behemoth does with a 100 people.
I wonder what the deciding factor is. I used to be part of a Haskell team and it was actually net negative vs. just using something really batteries included.
The technology choices follow on from this. If you have a smart team, then you can pick technologies that solve the problem most efficiently, rather than the lowest common denominator that everyone will be able to use, or what's most fashionable (you see this in every field: the "good" people are often following trends or best practices (and doing it well), but the very best tend to have a much more nuanced judgement. They know about the latest thing, they'll use it sometimes, but they keep their own council, and they're not afraid to go off and do something unorthodox if it makes sense for the situation they're in.
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Side point: Incidentally, React is actually on my list of go-to productive boring technologies. It's definitely overused (despite building React apps in my day job, my personal website is built with Hugo, and a lot of sites would be better off with server-rendered Django/Rails/Laravel), but where you need that complex client-side interactivity I think it's the generally best tool for the job.
^ This. As the project gets larger you can't find enough "star programmers" in a timely manner and have to fall back to mediocracy. Read "The Mythical Man-Month" and the associated Brooks' Law for context.
Could you elaborate on that? What were problematic?
BUT - i'm at a VC funded startup and can see how bloated these companies become whilst achieving not much. Our company got VC cash, then the VCs installed a CFO. First thing the CFO did was demote most of the engineering staff down to entry-ish level titles.
Then came product managers, program managers, directors of product management, senior directors of program management, VPs of product, and C-suite.
The Product:SWE ratio is 1:2 to 1:5 depending on the team. That is right, since we're falling behind on coding and quality, the obvious solution to hire senior people to go talk at conferences.
Meanwhile engineering headcount and QA headcount barely moved. When product timelines and quality suffered, instead of considering why SWEs were demotivated, they hired more Directors and more Product Managers to micromanage and oversee the efforts. Except the Product Managers are remote and we barely ever hear from them. We think they are product managing their own careers mostly, we see more activity on their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts than we see on Slack.
So what have people done? SWEs jet out of the office at 5, many are running startups on the side, some are consulting on the side.
Next thing you have a several-hundred-person-startup producing about what you produced with 50 people
Fuck me.
I've worked in a startup which processed 10,000s of different transactions from various countries around the world, we dedicated a whole 0.01 person to handling it. I think they were up to around 7 o 8 countries when I left. Had one full time dev and me a few days a week.
As in it was checked now and then, and we had the occasional query once a month.
YAGNI for a business like meetup. I don't think you realize just how much off the shelf, fire and almost forget stuff there is out there now.
6 person crew generating $40M a year with no VC funding. It was all operated off the money that came in the door. It can be done.
And I once ran a python script on my local computer and had no scaling issues. I dont know what all these people are talking about nginx, load-blanancers, blah! heck, I just used python -m simpleserver and Viola! it worked! See -- everyone can run a global business right from their macbook with 0 FTEs! I did it! (Please dont mind I picked the easiest script and conveniently based my business in places where Stripe works!)
People who don't need 15 FTEs, or even one FTE to take pretty large volumes of payments from many countries in the world.
Another reply is talking about $40 million turnover without a FTE.
The latest revenue figures I can find for meetup is $15 million.
So it begs the question, are you the incompetent and inexperienced one for needing to overengineer, or are we, for doing it cheaply?
I can support a trillion of US/Canadian/European transactions with mostly the same effort.
I think a lot of technologists confuse deploying code with actually handling transactions, charge-backs, local tax rates, etc. Also, just because you are small enough to ignore local tax laws does not mean everyone is.
Move fast and break things is all fun and games until you get charged for tax avoidance.
Five years ago, it was difficult to comply with tax laws in every US state, county, and jurisdiction (now there are services) -- can you imagine doing this globally?
I think you've never actually done this, have you?
Because things dont scale linearly? I mean I can support JSON messages in 5min. Another five minutes and I can support XML. So I should be able to support all the historical mainframe message formats in 5 minutes each right? No...
You can throw bodies at the front end by having support staff, bodies at the middle end by writing extensive help articles/documentation, or bodies at the back end to ensure you have robust data and reporting for pre-empting issues.
In any case, you need to think about it, and it'll take bodies.
I think you're over-estimating that by a factor of at least 15. If you're happy to say "let's just use Stripe, we'll support the countries they do, their payment forms are good enough" then that's like...1 FTE for a couple months to build your payments system, and then basically well under 1 FTE there-after to maintain it.
You can absolutely find work for 15 FTEs working on payments (and more!), and you'll probably end up with a better solution too, but there's plenty of startups accepting payments globally with, effectively, 0 FTEs working on payments.
This is an honest question, because I'm starting to seriously question my beliefs (I honestly though it was difficult.)
What's a bit newer is that it's a solved problem for people in other countries too; 10 years ago or so I really wanted to process payments, but none of the easy payment processors supported my country (mostly Braintree and Stripe back then), so I had to go with eWay (awful) and a merchant account from my bank (double awful). The company I'm with now (same country) uses Stripe, and it's a massively better experience. (Not being a Stripe fanboy; they have some very strong competitors, I just happen to be familiar with Stripe.)
Keep in mind: It matters where you (the merchant) are. Accepting payments from someone in Africa when you're in the US is trivial; accepting payment from someone in the US when you're in Africa is much harder. You can see where Stripe is supported here: https://stripe.com/global (and most of their competitors are in the same or fewer markets).
Also, there's still a lot of pretty bad legacy payment processors around, and they're often a fair bit cheaper. So if your company has been accepting payments online for twenty years, it may still be a pain for you, I wouldn't know. :)
But yes, the mom-and-pop website in Topeka should be using Shopify or have paid a web shop to throw together something equivalent using off-the-shelf packages, and it should be using Stripe (or Braintree, Square, Adyen, whatever), and then yes, they can accept payments globally, and the experience will be really nice. It's not even any extra work; it just comes out of the box for "free".
If people in those places don't have credit cards, I'd wait for Stripe to add whatever payment method they do use. (They've already added systems like Alipay and Klarna that are mainly used outside the US.) In the meantime, they can email me and we'll work out if they can mail me a check or use Western Union, or maybe I'll just give them an extended free trial or something. There are probably not so many people in the world who (a) don't have credit cards and (b) are interested in my software-as-a-service that I wouldn't be able to manually help them on a case-by-case basis.
(Disclaimer: I have worked on a mom-and-pop e-commerce website, but it shipped physical products and didn't operate internationally.)
The small company focussed on their core service. The VC corp has to reach out to new markets, increase sign ups, please advertisers and produce shiny growth figured for investors.
For users of the Meetup site it should be slim and I want to spend as little time there as possible (i.e. get invitation mail, ideally respond by mail, done) Meetup however wants me to "engage" trying to convince me to go to more meetups, rate them, comment, ... do as many clicks as possible while not driving users away ... all these deceptions take time to do, to try out, to A/B test. A committed founder who uses the site themselves notices where users got trouble and works on that. Maybe not in a team of five but also not hundreds.
I'm not the GP poster but that sounds like a good deal. So collect a paycheck, nod during the corporate circle-jerk of design meetings for weeks while working on your own startup and side consulting?
I'm not saying 5 people can run Meetup, but I wouldn't expect it to require the 270 employees that Google lists.
Most money goes to sales, business, strategy. Growing your company into meetup would take hundreds of employees endless sales calls, conferences, golfing dates, money raising, competitor spying, timing/luck and most importantly closers. Then you need people to manage, organize them, spy of them, babysit them and clean up after them. Nevermind the interns.. if they are paided.
It, like so many other companies in the networking space, were in the right place at the right time. And seem to many of us to have grown in proportion to the money thrown at them, rather than the actual operational need.
There are examples of companies that needed to do that, Groupon, etc., but that's because they had to actually do sales.
You could run Meetup with 5 people in a basement if you had simple subscription revenue, but effectively maximizing an advertising opportunity requires at least ~1000 people.
I’ve advertised on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google - there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into the “money making” bit of these companies.
Remove ad-revenue and all these companies would collapse. They have no other model.
I'm surprised how expensive it's become. I was paying $60/year in 2018 (when I abandoned the group), that's now doubled.
https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001620472-Organ...
That doesn't even take into account the number of fake groups that aren't really meetups so much as "here's a webinar in which I pitch stuff to you 1-on-1 or 1-on-2, if I can find a second sucker".
These problems can be mitigated early on by charging meetup organizers. If a $20 a month is too much, then it probably doesn't belong on a meetup site. It's enough that anyone willing to abuse the system will take the path of least resistance and use Eventbrite to host webinars.
Any other meetup communication should be made unappealing enough that moderation rarely becomes an issue. It should be possible for people on meetup to communicate, but it should be a second class citizen to however the organizers communicate with group members. Any forums that are part of meetups should suck just enough that nobody wants to use them unless they are serious about communicating something.
There are creative ways to handle moderation that don't require obscene amounts of money or employees.
why can my mobile phone provider outsource its support to $random company in $random country but meetup cannot ?
If you go the "minimize the official headcount" approach... now you need to make your software systems and business processs operable by $random users potentially with different first languages, with little context or history with the company. That's gonna require some significant tooling investments compared to the typical 5-person-in-a-basement operation.
You're not going to put up with that for Meetup.
Meetup as a website and app is a pretty small engineering footprint. The fact that you think is absurd shows how much we have been accustomed to this "Grow at all cost" mentality.
If I had to take a guess and break down the 200+ employees at Meetup, more than two thirds must be in BizDev, community relations, and artificial management layers. Out of the 70+ Engineering, a core of 20+ are probably really needed to keep the core app up to date and up and running. The other engineers are working on bets and new products that the company needs in order to justify its valuation and future returns.
Essentially I would say you get 90% of the product with 15% of the engineers. Everything else is small bets to justify the valuation.
And then you look at places like gumtree or craigslist and for these network effect businesses you realize the UX ain't worth the expense.
I bet if twitter hadn't gone through their SPA/etc. iterations they'd probably still be as big today.
Users are more likely to leave due to monetization efforts than a dated UI.
Of course, that's the pinnacle of an extremely small and simple feature set, and avoiding anything labour-intensive like moderation, or support, or sales. Indeed, they were iOS-only until 6 days before the acquisition was announced.
I agree you could not take Meetup in its current form and operate it with so few employees.
Maybe they have Hard Tech problems like dealing with griefers, but the basic group system looks pretty straightforward to scale with something like Google App Engine.
That said, I'm sure most of Meetup's employees are not engineering.
This is HN so commenters are focusing on the technical aspects where Meetup is clearly bloated for what the site delivers. However there's plenty of work to occupy several FT positions, just in customer support alone, when you're selling something to consumers online. Sales, HR, finance, legal and general admin are all necessary to operate at their scale.
I don't think any of those teams will be huge, but I expect it adds up. Just those listed ones are probably 20+ people, so add some management layer as well.
If you want to run your own server farm or offer lots of live customer service then the equation changes.
How much work you have to do scales with the number of people you employ. That is, if you keep hiring, people will continue to find more work to do and do it less efficiently.
Five people in a basement could absolutely remake the core functionality of Meetup and scale it to millions of users.
The hundreds or thousands of extra people are chasing long tail revenue, niche features, change for the sake of change, and supporting each other.
Give me a million dollars and a year and I'll have a ready competitor for Meetup.
Give me $10k and I'll have a working crappy clone.
Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp.
... of a product
> Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp.
... minimum viable PRODUCT.
That's not a company. That's a product. A company has to handle abuse, support, sales, marketing, expanding into new markets, partnerships, etc.
The difference you will see on the examples being cited here are those companies existing on ad revenue (or in growth-cash burn mode making no $) -- if you can ignore realities of business then yes you can run lean.
Show me an Instagram or WhatsApp that had global payments, regulations, taxes, etc and managed to do it with 5 or 10 or 13 people -- it does not exisit.
If history is any indication, we will learn this lesson, practice if for a little while, forget it, and be retaught it again in 6-12 years.
And in the very low-capital-requirement world of pure tech, VC funding is actually kind of as strange choice. A lot of startups would be much better off as coops.
Pagerduty is a prime example I have followed for a long time. It used to be so simple and just let you set up recurring rotations and used twilio to alert the current on-call person. You might even be able to set the original product up today with zapier for just a few cents per alert. I don't remember their early pricing, but my memory is it used to be very cheap. Now they're a public company with a huge enterprise sales team and their lowest tier is $29 per user, and there are all kinds of extra features they want to up-sell you on from there that most people don't need. Sure that's not so expensive in the scheme of things, but if there are 20 different little utilities like this you want to use it adds up.
(While I'm at it, that reminds me of another of the terrible patterns I see from all of these kinds of companies now, the per-seat pricing model even when the resource you're using doesn't scale that way. Want to set up CI builds in CircleCI? Surely they'll charge us for machine capacity. Well guess what, they also charge $15 per month per seat. You want folks on other teams who use different tools to ever be able to check in on the status of a build? Too bad, buy every one of them their own seat. If someone new ever even accidentally tries to sign in with github and you haven't provisioned a seat for them, CircleCI will actually stop running your builds until an admin goes in to upgrade your plan).
Anyway, it feels that there's a massive opportunity for a self-funded team of 5 or 10 people or in some cases maybe even 1 person to build a great lifestyle business that takes on the original focused use case of some of these ubiquitous SAAS platforms, but undercuts the big bloated business they are today on price by a huge amount.
What I do think however is that we might start to see a shift of talent towards more "mundane, boring" jobs. Less over-engineering apps for fancy startups on VC-lifesupport, more CRUD-apps for SME, big corps, government and whoever else seemingly less attractive than some cash-burning unicorn.
And for society, it might be for the better. Too many startups these days seem to be focused on value extraction instead of creation (meetup might be one of the few exceptions).