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?
If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most of them that did it better with more devs/staff, as evidenced by the general lack of 1 person saas companies out there that solve more than a very niche problem.
AIUI OnlyFans actually did successfully compete pretty directly with Patreon for a while as a 3 dev company. (I assume they may have grown a little since then)
He's not wrong. Patreon's technical platform isn't cutting edge or unique and could be replicated fairly quickly by a small team in a month or two. Most of what makes Patreon what it is comes from the other parts of the company, i.e., the marketers, account managers, etc., that bring in the actual revenue.
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.
Is that true? I feel like every past discussion about Patreon, as well as from the folks I know who use it as artists, they're not really getting much in terms of marketing or assistance/management. I certainly have a hard time believing that they're making most of their money from their "services" outside of just relaying money.
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.
That's a problem with the people, not with the tech. They overhired without training people into the roles they were hired for.
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.
They've been pretty adamant about not chasing after business/enterprise sales and I bet this is a big reason why.
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.
Okay but it doesn't seem like patreon needs to, or is even chasing after enterprise sales? At least in the b2c space it doesn't seem like you need a huge engineering team.
I meant that in response to why Discord can be so successful with 1% of the employees of other chat products. It's because they're not actually similar products. One is for casual chat (with no pretense of security) and one is for business chat.
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.
Have they outperformed Zoom and Teams? That feels like a stretch, even if I prefer Discord to either of them
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.
I don't disagree with you, but Zoom is also providing a pretty different service, and Teams provides a lot of enterprise level stuff that Discord doesn't. Discord is better for us perhaps, but it's definitely doing worse as a matter of revenue.
Most of them? Can you give an example of a 5 person competitor competing with a large company?
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?
It's amazing how consistently HN people underestimate the workload involved in basically any software product, and how often this blog post is relevant: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
> 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.
People who say this have never worked in an enterprise, global software company. Or if they did, they may not be working on key projects.
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.
> to monthly bill a list of people and transfer it to a different list
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. ;)
1 is bit low with number of customers that is both creators and users. But I would see the right number reasonably be under 100. With some geographical distribution.
That’s like a single person saas.