[gjhgqpqndpe]

Sort of interesting just to hear about the ups and downs of companies like dubsmash. They were often cited as an example of Berlin's future as a startup city [1]. They went from 35+ employees to 27 [2] to now 12 as they've stated in this post. They also moved from Berlin to New York, which seems to imply they felt like the city couldn't offer what they currently need. It looks like in the process of moving they didn't take that many of the employees with them (maybe this was also a way out of strict German employment rules?) Seems like a bit of an attempt at a restart (co-founder Roland Grenke seems to be gone, etc).

[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/european-startups-2016-berlin [2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/dubsmash-9m/

[svantana]

Looking at their rank history at AppAnnie, they were doing really well in 2015 but it's been downhill from there (from top 10 to >500 in all the major App store charts). How they were able to go from 140M to 350M downloads in the last year (compare this article with the techcrunch one) is a complete mystery. Also, stating your number of users without any qualifier (e.g. MAU) in a tech article is a bit of a red flag, in my experience that usually means that it's a vanity number (yearly active? Who knows).

[kolmogorov]

It also sounds odd that they have 3 engineers and 12 employees. What do the other people do? And hopefully they had more than 3 engineers back when they had 35 employees...but even then why would they choose to fire engineers and have that tech to non tech ratio?

[tqkxzugoaupvwqr]

Dubsmash relies heavily on copyrighted content from big studios (at least it did when it became popular). I guess most staff works hand in hand with media companies to promote their content inside the app.

[tschellenbach]

We share a Slack channel with Dubsmash, (they use getstream.io for their feed technology), I heard that they are hiring like crazy at the moment.

[gjhgqpqndpe]

Sounds like that deserves a bit of caution. They were "hiring like crazy" not long ago in Berlin, I guess those jobs would have lasted less than a year:

https://twitter.com/justproductjobs/status/83132760282459340... https://twitter.com/BetaListJobs/status/829744239852548096 https://twitter.com/BetaListJobs/status/824655808680095753 https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/130465/android-developer-f-m-...

[kunthar]

interesting, they even couldn't manage a basic signup process. app says my email is in the users list. when i try to login, it says no email is exist in their system. tried forgot option same. ok, hire someone to manage your acl part guys ,_,

[sundev]

Agreed, that part was lengthy as well, seemed to be way too many steps, but with the amount of users they've acquired that process doesn't seem to be an issue.