[sn0w_crash]

I agree this sounds suspect.

A lot of people don’t realize what “$14mm ARR” means. The contract, accounting and legal work alone would require a couple of people.

Not to mention Infrastructure, monitoring, QA, etc - all that good stuff.

It costs money to generate revenue.

[brianwawok]

I mean, I run a startup not doing that much worse.

I have 0 accountants (pay CPA yearly for tax work). 0 lawyers. 0 devops. 0 QA. 0 monitoring . 0 HR.

I do have : 3 devs (if I include myself) 3 support (tickets) 2 other supporting roles

If I coded 100% myself (which I have in the past and could in the future, it would just mean less new features) and had a way to not answer tickets (like the OP story it sounds like due to product complexity), I could totally do this alone…

It’s amazing how lean you can be in SaaS if you must. Us bootstrappers know this.

So much if a modern enterprise is bloat.

You have how many DBAs? How many QA? Lol.

[psaux]

That might be SAAS. The other side of the coin is not the same. You do a multi year multi million dollar deal with a fortune 100, don’t expect 0 lawyers, 0 CPA’s.

[codingdave]

You hire a lawyer for that specific work. At $14M ARR, you can afford to hire one when needed. They don't have to be a full-time employee. Same goes for accounting or any other operational staffing. Part-time or project-based contracting works great for such things.

[brianwawok]

Right, it would be insane to have a full time lawyer (or HR or Monitoring or DevOps) at that size.

At $600 an hour you can likely do all your legal work in 0-10 hours a year.

[jeromegv]

So you are 8 people. Quite a lot different than a single person.

If you had a way to not answer tickets, that means you would not offer support to customers, so likely a lot less customers would be interested to pay you. You don’t get to 14 millions by cheaping out that way.

[speleding]

I run a SaaS, quite similar numbers to the parent. Depending on the complexity of your support tickets, it's pretty easy to outsource to part-time freelancers. I just pick up the tickets that they flag as too difficult for them. (Edit: we're still quite some ways off $14M, but I could see it scale there without changing the structure much)

[brianwawok]

Right, its a different product though.

He has a low support required product. But I can 100% imagine making a product without much support required, and running it. Tis not hard.

[formerkrogemp]

More like you end up with minimal staffing a la floqast for example.

[p1necone]

Dev and devops shouldn't be separate people anyway. If your devops person isn't also working on the product you're doing it wrong (in my only slightly educated opinion).

[HWR_14]

There is a literal order of magnitude difference between a SaaS product generating $14MM AAR/employee and your situation.

[riskneutral]

No lawyer or bookkeeper is a terrible idea. But they don't need to be FTEs.

[sbarre]

My bet is employees here refers to full-time salaried employees.

No doubt they work with contractors and freelancers. The article even says they have "a few people to write content for the blog".

[tomschwiha]

Those need to be managed, I would definitely hire someone to manage and to load off stress yourself.

[eloff]

Get one of those people to manage the group. You call it the lead role, and pay them sightly more. You don't need a dedicated manager.

[proamdev123]

Yeah, but if those things were outsourced that would support the “1 full time employee“ claim.