Why You Should Charge from Day One | Hacker News Reader

Why You Should Charge from Day One

rocketship.fm

31 pointsrobn_fastmail11 comments

Rob, I spotted this on the download page:

>"During this 15-year journey they were acquired, but subsequently bought the company back a few years later and are now wholly owned by the staff."

Non-small tech companies owned by staff are pretty rare. Have you ever written anything about the experience? Does it work well? Is it structured like a co-op or similar?

(sorry for the barrage of questions, but I've always wondered about this)

Several companies on this list are household names; Avis was run as a typical corporation, W. L. Gore has no managers, and Springfield ReManufacturing is discussed in Jack Stack's book _The Great Game of Business_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compani...

Thanks. Interesting to see Huawei on the list.

There's actually not that much to write about. It's a regular company with share holders, the share holders just happen to be some of the staff.

Fortunately the owners all get on very well, have similar beliefs in which technical, financial and marketing directions we want to head in, and love what we do. The result is that everything just runs pretty smoothly, so far at least :)

I think I mentioned in the interview though, the difference in vibe between being owned by Opera and being owned by the staff isn't as big as you'd think. Much more important is just actually loving what you do, the things you create, and the people you work with. All of those are absolutely great, both as they were under Opera and now back under staff ownership IMHO. I wonder if other FastMail staff will have their own thoughts :)

> I wonder if other FastMail staff will have their own thoughts :)

Ok, thanks for the nice soapbox, boss :)

I've been at FastMail for ~2.5 years. The first 1.5 was as Opera. I haven't noticed a substantial difference between the two owners. Under Opera there was a very small amount of bureaucratic tension in a couple of places but that's to be expected given the amount of freedom we had. There's some decisions we've been able to make more quickly now we're on our own, but I don't think there's anything in particular we would have done differently had we not left Opera. I do miss the occasional trips to Norway though...

What I love the most about FastMail is the trust. Competent technical people can recognise other competent technical people, and though some days I feel like bit of a fraud because everyone at the company is crazy smart, I know I'm good enough to pass most of the time. They obviously agreed, because on my first day I was given complete, unrestricted access to everything - keys to the kingdom. Along with that I got told "do cool stuff and don't fk it up".

It probably took me 18 months to really understand that they actually meant that. If I have an idea I can run with it and don't need to ask for permission. If its complicated and I don't understand something, I'm expected to get help. If I screw it up, then I'm expected to get up at 3am and fix it, and deal with the support calls and the PR fallout, and the general embarrassment around the office.

The flip side is that I have to take complete responsibility for my actions. If we agree to as team to do something, we're all responsible for driving it, and we're all expected to hold each other to account. If I promise to deliver something, then it has to be delivered. No one will get fired for a mistake - fear doesn't exist in our dojo - but if you screw up someone is going to pull you aside and ask what happened and how we can avoid it next time. Though that's kind of cool too because you learn pretty quick that if you screw up its easier to just write an email to the team telling them so and explaining what needs to change to stop it happening again.

All of this only works if everyone is really passionate about the service and is happy to get their hands into whatever thing is important that day and take responsibility for everything. We've had staff in the past that were good at what they did, but didn't deeply care about the service. So they had a tendency to not completely polish everything, or overengineer, or not step outside of their area of interest, and it didn't work as well.

A possible downside of all this is that none of us seem to have a strong distinction between "work" and "home". We work wherever there's network, from all over the world, at all hours. Its pretty normal for me to get home (assuming I didn't arbitrarily decide to work from home or a coffee shop or whatever that day), spend a couple of hours with my family, and then get straight back into it. But that's only because most days I sit back down at my desk and can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing!

I'm not actually one of these owner-staff people, but "just" an employee, but really that only seems to be make any difference when we're talking about financial or legal stuff. On technical matters, we're all equal. I've pulled up one or more of the owners before on stupid technical decisions. I've walked in and said "you've got too much on your plate, I'm taking this and this". I will defer to them on stuff related to financials and legals because ultimately its their money and necks on the line, but that's fine because my opinion is always heard and valued.

Yeah, this sounds like an impossible magical fairy land. I still don't quite believe it some days, but it really is this great. That's the culture RobM and others have built over the life of the company. I don't know how deliberate it was, but I'm going to work hard to make sure it stays that way because every day I'm excited to get up and go to work, and a little disappointed to have to leave and go home and/or go to bed.

If I ever start another company, I am definitely going to do this. The burden of supporting only paying customers is so much lower, and you can really focus on what's important to them.

You only really have the choice of doing this if you are running a bootstrapped lifestyle company. You are not going to be a VC "outlier" if you do things like charging people for your product.

The fact that we even have a discussion about this is amusing. Outside the tech bubble what business even questions if they should be charging customers or not [1].

1. I am not saying that tech businesses are wrong to not charge (it is the most rational thing to do in many cases), but just pointing out how unusual tech is.

This really depends on who is considered to be a customer.

Imagine a street musician who wants every listener to pay money instead of few voluntary contributors. (Would fail - too little reach)

Or a shopping mall / water front/ etc. with an entry fee as an alternative to charging their retailers (without significant wow effect driving people in..)

A street musician is not a business. Shopping malls and the like are most definately businesses and they certainly charge their customers (the retailers) a great deal.

The whole reason that tech businesses can get away without charging their customers is their customers are not the people using the product. If you are cynical their customers are investors (and they certainly charge them). If you are less cynical the customers are some future user of the product. Tech is certainly an unusual business sector.

I enjoyed hearing about the history of FastMail, but there isn't really much here about "Why You Should Charge from Day One". How do we know FastMail couldn't have had more success with ads?

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