gjmacd

The most incredible sound system to hear a band play out of tune and out of key for 90 minutes.

Couple points to follow up.

- US based business, Boston. Taxes are higher, rent is higher (when you needed rent). Salaries are higher (if you want good people). As the founder, I wanted my company to have great benefits and healthcare. That cost (and I'm not kidding here) reduced our revenue considerably. This is why I'm a huge fan of a single payer option in the US that takes healthcare off corporations. - B2B business with SMB's, average customer ARR was about $3K. E-commerce integration product, so it was a bit of a lift on the technical side with many nuances between integrations. - Support ended up being about 75% of our labor costs.

This is otherwise known as a "lifestyle business". It's the north star for most people and should be but it's not easy.

If you build a $500K a year SaaS business and have very little overhead, you can probably take $200K of that revenue as income and have a good work-life balance that's very comfortable. I know, I was able to do this without taking VC and bootstrapping 100% on credit cards and my own cash. However, there's an inflection point that happens with this sort of business IF you're not careful -- or it becomes more successful / or becomes a death spiral.

If we're speaking of a true SaaS model. It can work. But there's "gotchas".

I did well with this and but eventually sold the business for about 3X and went back to work for another company. But for about 7 solid years as we gained customers and got to that $500-700K, it became very hard to keep it a "balance" as with every 10 customers we added, the more of my time was spent at work and not as much at home. As we added customers, my "balance" was diminished, so I had to hire people, which then cut my income considerably. In the end, I realized it was better to sell the business and take the profit I could to pay off my cards and get something out of it before it killed me. I used to tell people who used to say, "wow, must be great having a business like that!" I used to tell them, "Yes, it's amazing 100 hour work week!".

It became more of a "job" and less of a "lifestyle" as the customer count increased. This could have been anecdotal to my business and product, but I have to believe that it won't matter as that size annual revenue demands a bit more of a sophisticated product type. Unless you've hit lightning in a bottle and have a very "light work" product that you're selling and have cracked the code of hitting $500K and having to do barely anything, more power to you... But I don't think there's a lot of those out there and a lot to be created.

I just find that with most SaaS businesses I've been involved with and built, the product is solving business problems that aren't usually a "set it and forget it" kind of product to meet those requirements and just sit back and collect money... I find that most SaaS businesses in that range of revenue are complicated and warrant a higher degree of overhead.

The real challenge is, "little overhead" to be able to create an income and survive. Support, service and development is expensive and requires more than one person. Good support is important to retain your customers to keep that $500K coming in, and that really is the problem because having just 10-20 customers paying you $500K is far riskier than having 1000 customers paying you $500K.

Churn is dangerous in SaaS products that are high cost with smaller customer bases. One or two customers leaving could give you a pretty good dent in your revenue, thus causing you to cut income. So the trick is mitigating churn by having a product that's priced at a point that you can gain a larger customer base so that churn isn't going to radically impact your revenue.

But both strategies are going to require support and service and that costs quite a bit of money and can gravely cut your income that has to be passed to engineers/developers who can improve and maintain the product. I had to hire really good support people and some engineers because as we grew that revenue, the product became more complicated and support and service was more demanding (I had about 400 customers). I eventually had to cut my income to pass that to people who could take on more because I couldn't do everything.

So there is a law of diminishing returns with this sort of business strategy.

It can work, but you have to really strategize, have a product strategy that can generate a good sized customer base but requires very little maintenance, development, support and service.

But I call this the "holy grail" SaaS business -- they simply don't exist -- or if they do, they are rare birds. Just be prepared to understand the issues if you do have some success and are lucky enough to grown a SaaS business to $500K+

Just don't be surprised when you feel like you've succeeded but feel like you're failing.

Authors bio is exactly what is wrong with software development today. Too many people who've made money at FANG companies who now think they are experts in the field because they got lucky and was hired at a time when their stock price and options accelerated based on NOTHING they did...got wealthy and have convinced themselves (and others in the industry) that they actually should be thought leaders. Insane shit going on right now...

Bottom line: 10 years of non-coding experience in the industry (Sun & Intel), then about 5 years experience (assuming) development/coding and he's now a "serial entrepreneur" offering best practices advice for code reviews, architectural reviews... no mention of any product, technology or coding (where's the public Github account with demonstrable experience?) that he's actually delivered or maintained. I see a guy with 15 years of experience that got lucky with his options and is blathering on to boost his LinkedIn profile.

One thing for certain, he titled his article as something provocative to get the click-bait going and using "Moneyball" certainly caught my eye and made me curious. But after reading this article, it's fraught with problems and demonstrates the lack of experience and using very limited anecdotal evidence to apply to a field that's complex and not a single article solution, which I have to say, with less than 5 years of coding and development experience, he shouldn't be considered an "expert" that gives advice on this process -- he should still be listening to people and understanding how the SDLC process works because he's clearly missed that course at Standford -- He clearly didn't pay attention to Steven Blank...

Look, I know people with 20,30 (including me) years of experience in this field that would read this article and would point out, what you're reading is not only what inexperience is, but also what someone who's been too involved in the money and investment side of the business sees. If I had a manager in my team present these ideas to me and how they wanted to operate with 1:1's for example, I'd get them out of the company because they would be creating a culture of pointing fingers.

Also, as a side note, when I saw the title, I immediately assumed "outsourcing" article because the premise of Moneyball (Bill Bean / Bill James theory) is to use cheaper labor to get better results by doing things that can still get performance and wins without having to play the game the way in which the rest of the teams were, completely undermining the norms and trying to get better performance with less. This is a poorly titled article, the premise has nothing to do with the Bill James theory.

Lastly, I don't want to be totally negative,he had one good point in the article. Using time estimates for story pointing is a bad thing. His example of measuring complexity was a bit too vague and nuanced, but it was a better example of estimating to get to a valid burn down. But a broken clock is correct twice a day...

I would point to Jim Jordan and all the other Republicans after January 6th who didn't honor a subpoena and toss them in the trash. Nobody in our government honors them, why should we in the private sector? What's going to happen, they going to raid offices and get a bunch of PC's and books?

Meh. I won't switch to a Linux laptop until I can get a reasonable resolution on the screen that matches my MBP's output for a reasonable price.

I can't understand why I can't get a reasonably good priced laptop with just Linux that doesn't match the video resolution of a MBP.

This isn't for QA. It's for RPA, which automates processes. UIPath is a billion dollar software company doing this...

Unpopular opinion. But starting a business around AI is a bad idea -- it's a tool not a business. AI is the "Object Oriented" of our times. It'll end up being something that will be used in our tooling, but I recall all those 90's companies who died miserably basing their whole business model around objects... I feel like AI has the same future.

Major colleges are an absolute ripoff. If I asked you to give me $250K so that I could give you an $80K salary to start, which isn't a given, would you take that investment?

Community and state schools (and even state schools are too high) are the better way to go. Something has to give...

then he gets more than 10 users on it...

https://pragmaticstudio.com/tutorials/adding-tailwind-css-to...

Where Phoenix does a better job with all this and you don't have Ruby's baggage anymore.

Another reason to move to Elixir from Ruby...

Docker has made most mocking nonsensical considering how easy it is now to use the real thing... But I would disagree with the premise of mocking as being non-starter. Often times you want to unit test and don't really care if you're using the real "thing" but want to hit code that's got zero to do with that dependency. Good example, we use Okta to authenticate... We want to run unit tests that test how a component in our UI works within our application, we mock Okta to get around our authentication for testing that very thing. When we want to test authentication with Okta, that's what we do.

as soon as he went all "the managers", i knew he'd been poorly educated around Scrum. The funny think about Scrum is that upper management doesn't like it. They'd rather operate in a waterfall approach because they can blow up roadmaps and not have any trace of the offense. With Scrum, you can do the "Ok, but that will require you remove X points from this Sprint and replace that work." Which has a check and balance on that sort of problem when someone wants something unplanned or changes scope on things. Scrum's s a tool to ensure that you have some level of "management" for the management but also it demonstrates how developers aren't always magicians. That's what people who don't like Agile/Scrum don't quite get.

I came from the company that virtually invented Scrum (Easel Corp / Jeff Sutherland) -- showing my age now, I assure you -- it wasn't invented to give non-technical people the power over developers. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was created to help developers ensure that their lives could be validated in the timebox of work that was required of them. No offense, but you need to probably work in a better Scrum environment. Sounds like you haven't experienced Scrum properly.

IMHO, No it's not. This isn't Dropbox or FTP. Conceptually, some of thing things Git does is are not easy concepts to distill into a couple commands to achieve what Git sets out to do. Sure, you can use it in a basic way, but that's not the point, Git is incredibly powerful tool.

In fact, on my teams, I make sure people use the CLI and not use a frontend wrapper so they grab the concepts before they go "willy nilly" into the comfort of GitLens or another UI that masks their understanding of what they are actually doing.

You should always understand the underlying commands you're executing. Rebase, merge, branch, etc. aren't easy concepts to understand and they aren't easily conveyed for beginners in a graphical tool.

and why was there a "master" key?

When Pro tools, Reason and all the major "creative" apps decide to port over to Linux (remember, Microsoft's desktop is moving in this direction), I think the macbook's days will be numbered when you can get a similar device in formfactor and quality for 1/3 of the price running Linux... I actually think Apple doesn't care. They want people to buy iPad's and iPhones and get out of the laptop and desktop business.

Someone needs to explain to me what the benefits of NoSQL with MongoDB are when you have the JSONB column type and the ability to query and insert at the field level with JSON in PostgreSQL? Maybe there's some benefit, but I'm not seeing that major "gotta have it" feature or performance gains. And I ask this question seriously, because I just don't know the answer.

Not naming the company, but I know of a startup that's got a round of $10M (not much but enough) who just applied for relief because their burn rate is $200K+ a month. They have no customers, have been in the red for 2 years and have been slowly building their product out -- like most early funded startups -- they are building potential without revenue (yet).

Their theory is, get some free money and treat it like 6 months of salary to help and take it as a "gift".

When I cited that they "weren't directly affected by this and could keep going until this COVID thing ended and it wouldn't matter to them." The person I know who's involved at the exec level said, "It's free money, when you get a free bag of money, you don't turn away on that..."

I wanted to throw up.

Article headline is really incorrect, should be "The Most Unremarkable Mysterious Song on the Internet."

There's a reason why people didn't put their name on it.

I wouldn't want to work for a company that frowned upon a gap in work experience based on a medical issue. If the topic comes up, tell the truth. If they balk, you should run fast and hard from that company.

Dumb question: But have you taken a longish vacation? And I mean one that's 3-4 weeks or more that has nothing to do with work?

They have evidence of Assange offering help to Chelsea Manning to try and hack a government server.

Except Paul Manafort is in prison for lying about this "treasure trove" of information to the FBI he was getting from Assange.

Show me WikiLeaks that are critical of Russia in a way in which makes Putin look like he's the problem... Yet, we've got hundreds of anti-US (or other countries) leaks that when you read them help the cause of Russia and Putin. Assange was a Russian operative, willing or unwilling.

I think yarn workspaces and lerna can help reduce a lot of teh redundancy in your project(s).

Not one mention of age as being a factor as passing over good talent because of ageism. I'm 54, I walk through the door to interview and people run the other way before I even sit down with them because I probably look like their Dad -- meanwhile, i'm not only as current on skills than anybody I'm talking to, I'm probably the best option at a startup since I've seen it all (three and four times over). It's ridiculous that you age out of this industry at 45.

Use your eyes. Have you walked into a Supermarket? Or better, when's the last time you saw MORE retail store hiring MORE help and not actually cutting (because Amazon's choking them off). Better, ATM machines are now charging $5.00 per transaction fees because cash is no longer needed. Automation is a bad word for all this -- it should be called simply "job replacement" -- and it comes in all forms of technology than can help us in many ways, but also has ramifications like job loss. People need to use their eyes. He's not wrong. He's not full of it.