Bandcamp had 118 employees total. That doesn't smell bloated to me.
(Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland...)
(Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland...)
The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles.
Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth!
EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...
We often look at private companies going from initial bootstrap to their first exit, and I'm telling you, those are a whole different ball of wax. They manage to do a shit ton with not very many people.
That being said, 118 still sounds pretty lean for the scale they are operating at.
I have also seen some eye watering monthly AWS bills where it makes total sense to hire a bunch of devs to bring those down by even a few percent.
Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it.
I would also add that Bandcamp was pretty publicly profitable prior to their sale to Epic. Given that they didn’t significantly grow the staff after the acquisition, they would have had to make huge blunders in a very short period of time they owned it. So at this point we’re talking about laying folks off purely for better looking numbers, not really for sustainability.
So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts.
As for most people abhoring PE, believe me, I am under no illusions about our clients. But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%), so while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
> I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all
n=1, but that’s true of my perspective as well so perhaps it’s a wash. I do think the editorial staff were more important to some genres than others.
> they sure like to sell their companies to them
I might suggest that this is a case where upper management’s desires directly conflict with the people making the noise (staff and users)
I suspect that there's not a lot of overlap between people who publicly fume about good companies being ruined by profit-hungry buyers, and people who start companies explicitly so they can flip them to profit-hungry buyers and ditch.
Does anyone still start businesses with the intention of building and maintaining a really excellent product/service in the long term? Do any of them hold on to that ideal after a few years?
Define "a few". You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end; eventually, they want to do something else or retire. So at some point, they have to sell. Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually. If the company is just a passion project, no one buys it and it just goes under when the owner gets tired of it.
If the the loan gets paid off, boom... co-op equally owned by the workers.
In any case I don't see why you would need the detour via local government? A bank could lend the money to the group of employees just fine.
It exists, just not in SV
And why do people assume that the kids are going to run it well or the same way the founder did? If anything, it seems like the kids of highly successful people are usually spoiled brats, and nothing like their parents. Did Bill Gates' kids create any successful software companies?
The second paragraph wasn't related to your response, it was related to prior posts by others and just an add-on for the discussion at large (in case anyone's even still reading it, which I doubt).
That's not actually weird, though. The idea that everyone should be expected to change jobs every few years is very recent.
> Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually.
I didn't think this needed specifying, but there's a large difference between the goals "Create a great, enduring service and make a profit doing it" and "generate as much short-term profit as possible regardless of long-term consequences."
Sometimes people just want to do something different with their time after running their business for a long time and a PE deal is the easiest and most structured way of doing that.
Just to add a conflicting opinion, I love the articles and often use them for music discovery and purchases. Of course, the primary function is to purchase music from known entities but the discovery part keeps me coming back. In terms of ROI, to me the articles seem like a pretty smart marketing move…without them I would not have discovered all kinds of artists and made numerous purchases.
My guess is the big content initiative was someone's brain child, and once companies get past a certain size, it's very hard to pull the plug on a leader's baby. Until the company changes hand and the next set of leaders want to eat the previous young and put their own babies in there.
Can you provide a source for this? I don't doubt it, but I'm wondering if this is accurate for startups that have raised seed+ funding.
To provide an opinion from a user of the platform with "no skin in the game" regarding non-technical aspects of the platform, the social presence of Bandcamp was a significant portion of its appeal to me. I did not (and generally do not on other platforms) regularly seek out new media, and instead tend to rely on on various social media feeds and suggestion algorithms to help expose me to new music. I used to follow Bandcamp on multiple platforms until their acquisition by Epic, when I stopped following them for ideological reasons. The headlines/titles/posts that Bandcamp produced up until that point were far more alluring and generally attractive than any other music platform that I also followed, and their articles were generally of a significantly higher quality than others as well, with a large focus on the artistry present.
I discovered several artists through this form of interaction that I otherwise wouldn't have, and haven't since I began avoiding Bandcamp after their acquisition. I can't imagine that layoffs are targeting purely technical staff (as technical staff are the backbone of the observable functionality of the business), and I fear that the strategy taken by Songtradr will result in a tremendous detriment to the marketability and external usability of the platform. This cost-cutting measure seems to signify either a terribly-fated problem regarding changes to the company, or yet another act of private capital tearing down its competition. Given that Songtradr is in the market of licensing music, I am strongly influenced to believe the latter; using a buyout to cripple _the_ commercially-successful indie music platform (which serves as a competitive and independent means of releasing and licensing and distributing music) seems like a logical way to further capture a part of a market that has historically been dominated by media giants that use legal precedence to dominate.
Hahaha I don’t think that they have as glowing reputation as you think. I’ve heard creators complaining about lack of transparency, lack of communication, poor customer service, arbitrary decision making with no reason given, etc.
They could be trusted by a bunch of people to probably screw things up less than alternatives and to at least be -trying- to care about the community, while still having made more than enough mistakes to generate a bunch of justifiably unhappy people.
Think about how e.g. your favourite hosting provider nonetheless has a bunch of unhappy ex-customers.
(I'm not asserting what -is- the case here, mind, just trying to flag up a part of the possibility space that I've seen quite a few times over the years)
> Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet.
And your comment reads like a typical HN armchair technologist.
> It’s not a very complicated product,
Yup, here we go. Classic "I could build this in a week".
>and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity.
Actually it's not. Much of PE is what is driving people to start companies, because it provides a reliable exit path. I know many tech founders who are grateful PE exists, otherwise they would not have the capital available to them to grow their companies. People typically abhor large cap PE which focus on financial engineering. Many growth PE firms (the ones the parent and I usually work with) are value focused, which means focusing on profits (EBITDA) and growth.
Seriously, I feel like a broken record when I say "Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" etc.
Please tell that to Apollo Global Management as loudly as you can. I mean, if they're one of your customers.
Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it.
PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for more than just what they are...money.
They need to understand that they are just people with money. The same way I understand that I am just a techie that produces things.
I bought a loaf of bread today, but that doesnt make me a baker or an expert in baking or running a bakery.
Same applies to PE. Just because they buy businesses and invest in them, doesnt make them experts in whatever they buy.
Sizable firms can easily afford a seven or eight figure compensation package for someone really really competent.
Very frequently what we are doing is providing an outside voice with a direct line to the top to recommend things the CTO or VP Eng already knows and wants to do. I have had many technical leaders personally thanks us and say how relieved they were to have diligence done by real hackers, and how much this was going to help.
Songtradr just did a series D in 2021 for $50MM and recently acquired 7Digital for $23.4MM. I couldn't find a statement on how much it cost to acquire bandcamp, but it seems this might be motivated by Songtradr being cash poor and not wanting to dilute further.
"But within this discrepancy lies a paradox: Bandcamp, as comparatively threadbare as it may seem, with about $20 million in net revenue in 2022, is almost certainly profitable—based on the fact that the company has stayed lean and taken on no new funding since 2010"
https://www.fastcompany.com/90951664/bandcamp-spotify-vinyl-...
Songtradr - 45MM revenue / 157 employees = $287k/employee Bandcamp - 30MM revenue / 118 employees = $254k/employee
https://www.zippia.com/songtradr-careers-1401192/revenue/ https://growjo.com/company/Bandcamp
Of course it's also possible that that it's specific places (i.e. the content) that are being gutted as they aren't seen to be worthwhile.
The things is that once a company sells, it keeps the name, but can instantly become a different company as far as culture goes. If we want to complain about bandcamp being crappy to its people, the finger should be pointing at the owners (whatever round it was) who a) made the hires and b) made the decision to sell. You are throwing your employees to the wolves when you do that. Once you've sold, the decisions are now ultimately made by a new entity with new priorities (for better or for worse).
This is one of the reasons I advise any younger devs I talk to to understand their employer's ultimate game plan. If the employer is hoping for an exit in the period during which you plan to work for them, you should be under no illusions that your job is safe or will stay the same, and you should be getting compensated accordingly. This is the cost of working in the gravy train - we get the high salaries, but we also get the uncertainty that comes with working in a business where exits are so frequent. The two are connected. (And I have been on the employee side during an acquisition twice now, so I've been there.)
At its heart, tech is adapting to change and uncertainty through the fusion of creativity and process. Job changes are just another input.
It's interesting people are talking about bloated software in this thread and their love of lean software. Large teams often lead to bloated software.
On an internet with billions of users online, there's a legit argument that most if not all technology companies are severely bloated.
Now maybe their business model was flawed (I heard it was profitable, but perhaps not profitable enough). But otherwise 118 people for a global brand-recognized business is pretty lean already: I have worked for medium sized businesses around the same headcount you have never heard of, which don't even operate outside their home country.
Bandcamp has been one of the most functional and user-centered designs on the web for a long time now. They asked for far less commission on sales, and they provided options for downloading music in FLAC and even WAV formats, and were well ahead of the curve with “pay what you can” pricing. I have been a musician all of my life. I used Bandcamp exclusively to distribute my music online, and every musician I have ever known prefers it over every other option—by wide margins. Part of what we liked was how little it engaged in feature-creep and bloat.
Headcount always grows disproportionally whenever you start dealing with payments.
Not just directly taking them but all of the associated compliance and legal issues.
there's certainly operations that are leaner than that. a little down the thread there's people saying they could build bandcamp in a weekend, which is probably fanciful but also not completely off base. just on a pure technology level, bandcamp seems like a 3-4 developer sort of project. so they've got ~110 people running sales and support?
I wouldn’t call it “one person and a weekend” simple, but the site has been around since 2007. A dozen people could have built it fairly comfortably from a basic site at the start to the scaled up version of today. 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.
I have no idea where they are in that scale of course.
At a large enough scale you will still need a lot of people dealing with infra. AWS is not magic
> 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.
You'll need 20+ people just to deal with copyright issues on a daily basis.
It's also most importantly not a single trusted entity that people can trust with their payments like Bandcamp is.