It’s weird these companies grow this big. How many software engineers do you need to monthly bill a list of people and transfer it to a different list?
That’s like a single person saas.
That’s like a single person saas.
And of those, how many of them can only do that because they're outsourcing most of their needs to some other company people regularly complain is bloated?
Being over-staffed is different from "one person can run this as a saas business"
Teams, Google's VoIPs, Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Zoom
Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has way higher demands from support, higher expectations about downtime, and all the third party integration requests. It has to integrate with Jira, it has to integrate with Google Calendar, it has to integrate with this niche service that changes their API every month and doesn't care your contract with Dairy Queen relies on this integration working.
It's not specifically about avoiding enterprise, it's about them recognizing what sort of business decisions are sustainable with small team capabilities. Enterprise chat adds a TON of requirements and harsher penalties for mistakes.
In Patreon's case, it's one of those business models that a small team just cannot survive in at scale.
Sure, storing some payment data in a database and charging a payment API once a month in a job queue is a weekend project. But then you get your first email about a stolen credit card being used. And one from Disney lawyers about how someone is using their Patreon account to sell Disney intellectual property. And an email from FBI because someone is using it to sell illegal images. And from creators whose account got hacked and all their payments redirected to a new bank account. Or the subscribers who want a refund because they're unhappy. Or the people who realize that if you say your credit card was stolen, you can access the exclusive content from any creator and get a refund the next day.
Plus, they had a small team, but I met most of them back in the Hammer and Chisel days and they were already a 20 person team at that point at least.
I'm not at all trying to say you can't have a good product with a small company. It's the incessant "I could do this myself in a month. I won't actually do it, but I totally could" responses. Almost every company you've heard of isn't getting by on single-digit employees, let alone one very smart person.
Better product
Of course, that's also the reason why a tiny company can't just replace Patreon: it's not the tech that matters. It's the marketing and other people stuff that you just can't handle with a small team.
It's not a good sign that Patreon is doubling down on engineering and eliminating the positions that actually bring in revenue. That's a sign of a poorly managed company not understanding its value proposition. Keeping extra engineers on staff to create yet another cryptocurrency isn't going to save Patreon, but the absence of the two dozen plus marketers and account managers they just fired will be acutely felt as they go into the holiday season.
Their discovery is pretty awful too. My understanding is that they're mostly viable because there's no easier way to solicit money as a podcast/youtube channel right now.
On discovery: Tiktok, for example, is absolutely slaying Insta, Snap, and Twitter. Tiktok uses human curation; the other 3 use an algorithm.
Note that Patreon takes a % of all transactions, so the key driver is increasing transactions. They don't need fancy new tech for that; they need more human interaction.
> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.”
Products are nearly always more complicated internally than it appears to the user. Indeed, often the very ease of use that you see as an end user is because of higher complexity on the inside.
Just SCALE ALONE is enough to expand a group of engineers a significant amount. A personal project is fine to run 1 AWS or Digital Ocean instance to run the application, database. But global distribution that has to support tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million+ users concurrently globally? It's a big orchestration of applications and services that requires much larger teams.
Add in payment services and managing those integrations. Then, given that you're a global company and have to operate in multiple countries you have all sorts of regulatory compliance requirements. Who oversees that? Who manages all of these requirements? Not a single dev or a small team.
On the other hand
How much friction there's between decision makers and people writing code in those companies?
How much time is wasted on meetings, teaching new people every month, etc, etc?
Sorry, but I really can see scenerios where 5 skilled engineers with domain knowledge can outperform 25-50 that need meetings to agree on everything
Sounds like a fantastic service to use for fraud or money laundering. It would be a shame if you had to dedicate a ton of employees towards preventing that. ;)