Re:WeWork sells Meetup
by billyhoffman on Monday March 30, 2020 @04:01PM
(#22731716)
> Give me $10k and I'll have a working crappy clone.
... of a product
> Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp.
... minimum viable PRODUCT.
That's not a company. That's a product. A company has to handle abuse, support, sales, marketing, expanding into new markets, partnerships, etc.
Well said. to add to that list, real companies often have to handle taxes, international payments, regulations, laws. Also, enterprise companies (not retail app gimmicks) also have sales forces, contract people, and account execs. Those scale with the growth of the business (hopefully sub-linearly, but still scale.)
The difference you will see on the examples being cited here are those companies existing on ad revenue (or in growth-cash burn mode making no $) -- if you can ignore realities of business then yes you can run lean.
Show me an Instagram or WhatsApp that had global payments, regulations, taxes, etc and managed to do it with 5 or 10 or 13 people -- it does not exisit.
How much work you have to do scales with the number of people you employ. That is, if you keep hiring, people will continue to find more work to do and do it less efficiently.
Five people in a basement could absolutely remake the core functionality of Meetup and scale it to millions of users.
The hundreds or thousands of extra people are chasing long tail revenue, niche features, change for the sake of change, and supporting each other.
Give me a million dollars and a year and I'll have a ready competitor for Meetup.
Give me $10k and I'll have a working crappy clone.
Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp.