A 20-year-old small company

We're a 33-year-old small company, with thirty employees. I started the company in 1992 to do custom programming (VB and MS Access) and network support (Novell NetWare). I slowly grew to five employees. In 2000 I did not enjoy billing out our hours, so I decided to develop a product -- a web-based issue tracking application to help with IT support. The transition from a services business to a product business was much more difficult than I anticipated, but we made it. Now Issuetrak is doing fine. From what I read on Hacker News, there are nice aspects to working in a small company. We have no outside investment, so we call our own shots. Everyone is close to the customers. We listen to all team members' ideas. Everyone knows who is contributing. We can work from home. After 25 years of taking customer suggestions, our product is robust. We provide prompt, very good telephone support. We win deals (and lose them too) against competitors that are 400 times our size. One of the biggest satisfactions is that when we survey our customers after each support encounter, it is not unusual to hear them say that Issuetrak is the best software company they've ever dealt with. My salary is probably less than that of many FANG engineers, but life is good.

CodeWeavers, which I am very lucky to be part of, is also an (almost) 30-year-old small company! We make Wine, Proton, and CrossOver, you might've heard of them. And I think we are hiring as well, please have a look!

I hope to be able to write this blog post in 20 years. My co-founder and I started a bootstrapped company 3 years ago do IaC orchestration and we are slowly but steadily growing. We love being small. We love being accountable to our customers. We love having the freedom to make decisions. Yes, it's not always easy. We explicitly don't want to be a billion dollar company. We want to make a product that serves our niche exactly how they want to be served. We're definitely making less money than if we worked at another company. But we feel we can make it to our goal and think we'll be happy when there.

We are a 15 year old small company with 250 full time employees. I completely bootstrapped the company and never took a dime of debt or any investor money. We do web design and online marketing work. I tried building some products, and though they were game changers internally, they never took off externally. Now Coalition Technologies is services provider with a good reputation for standing behind our work. Though I do hate telling people my email address on the phone... C o a l I t I o n T E c h n o l o g I e s dot com. Why couldn't I have named it Pin or something haha.

This is called a successful small business and something to take great pride in outside of the SV bubble.

Even though we’re now 20 years old, we’ve always been a small company. Over the years, many colleagues have come and gone, and we currently have only 50 employees. Perhaps this is the reality of most startups - while many dream of going public, creating groundbreaking products, or being recognized globally, few achieve it. We can only do our best.

I praise you.

It is a good feeling reading this. The mentality that is (apparently) so rare today with the many ego pushing disrupters disrupting (obstructing actually, obstructers is the correct term here) life for everyone else. The providing service for others - shortly: creating actual, real value instead of appearances -, is not a typical and mainstream behaviour nowadays, the stability over fame, no, but the pushing spectacular sounding (made up for the purpose of sounding spectacular) elusive agenda on others for heaping up wealth is.

Manipulation instead of serving others is the norm.

Based on what hits the broad audience. Under the radar fair services like this are hidden from the public eye.

I feel that 50 people is not a small company!

It’s all relative, of course.

But 50 people is big enough that as the business owner, you’d need to be permanently in hire mode, just to replace people moving on for various reasons. And you’d be frequently be exposed to your employee’s personal issues.

I prefer running a _really_ small company - just 5 people.

Can't think of anything I'd like less than working at a company that has 100 employees after 1 year and then 200 the next year. Talk about mostly being occupied with moving desks, onboarding people and having growth other such growth pains. Not sure why people idealize working in this sort of environment. Other than that it can be lucrative to get in early in a growing business, what's the pull?

My dream was always a very small practice of tightly focused services and a humane work cycle due to low overhead. During crunch time you work hard and during slow times you relax and get paid a lot less.

But every time I had partners or colleagues there is this idea that growth is super important, everyone needs an assistant, and overhead grows to the point that you need $100k every month to make payroll. So everyone has to grind, and you have to take lower margin projects and it's 40 hours a week, except during crunch time where it's, well, a lot more than that.

I helped grow my second company to a profitable 20-person company, but I thought that was too big (and a lot of us worked crazy hours).

I joined and grew another company to around 30 people (I was not the owner so just following orders).

I was never able to find the right people at the right phase of life, with the right skill sets, so I have been a solo practice for a decade. But I always thought a 8-10 person, highly focused consulting practice is where it's at.

Man, I got that beat by 5+yrs and -49 employees. Most businesses are small businesses. 89% have less than 10 employees.

which company is this? what are their products? anyone got the link?

There's a point at which you can be too serious, simple, low-key, understated, etc.

What is this company, what does it do? There are no links to a main web page, or anything other than these few blog posts.

I'd guess that outside the Silicon Valley bubble (and few big names in other countries), most software companies are like this. Small, profitable and without a lot of debt.

I worked at one of these. Turned out it was a nepotism grift that flew under the radar. CEO came out of retirement to get an ironclad contract through his college buddy to do basically nothing and get paid for it.

I can't find more info about the author ? trying to find out what their company does.

but yeah insightful stuff.