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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> We’re a completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped team of four

$250k/yr each, +/- payroll taxes, etc. etc.

Anyone who things $250k is a normal salary has probably never left one of 20 or so top US tech cities.

Where I live, Sydney, it is impossible to get that in tech outside of executive management (which is not coding), rare positions at unicorns, and HFT C++ type jobs.

This is why so much of the best talent from Sydney, including a very talented former colleague of mine, are lured to Palo Alto and nearby cities.

Yeah it is tempting! I don’t think you even need to be “the best” right?

7+ billion people can only dream of this kind of money.

Yeah, the cost of running the company (software, server, marketing, sales, etc..) is important. ARR never shows the true picture.

I haven't read much of the article, but they claim early on that they have no marketing spend. Do they say later in the article what their sales, saas, and server costs are like?

They don‘t have a sales team, so no cost. So it‘s barely sone SaaS they use by themselves (e.g. slack etc.) and server costs.

As they are running very lean I expect at least 80% margin.

They could scale to $10M without probably any extra staff, or maybe an extra SRE? It isn't Twitter: They don't need an army of bloat-adding squads.

Revenue != profit

That doesn’t include hosting costs. So likely closer to 150k/employee of take home pay.

Not in a million years would it take $400k to run Plausible. It would be a fraction of this.

The 150k/year also accounts for overhead such-as taxes, HR, cash reserves for rainy day, software licensing etc.

Are all 4 developers? it looks way too much. What's left for other parts of the business?

I say this as a founder of a $1.5 mil/year SaaS

It‘s one developer, one marketer and when I remember correctly two for support.

i guess they might as well pack it in and go work at a MANGA

Maybe in dollar terms, but assuming the business keeps growing: they have sustainable income, they don't need to worry about getting laid off, they don't need to play politics with leadership, and they can turn the business into passive income by hiring someone to take over.

At this stage they are a lifestyle business, its not hard to grow it even more if they get investments. If they can sell the business over $10 million, they already surpass what most corporate employees will earn in their career. That's a very attainable valuation in 2022 with a PM fit product.

And slave away for the rest of their lives?

I'm sure they're not killing themselves with work and I'd trade equity in plausible with any job

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