It had to hire them later on. Because when there are users - you need support, take out fires etc.
And this exact thing will happen with any homebrewed SaaS.
You either run a business or play tech company making your own saas instead of focusing on your business.
Sure you can do both in very rare cases - if you are SpaceX or similar, otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot.
Even then, startups prioritize growth over efficiency. So maybe 100 people would have been fine but 1000 gets them a 5% growth improvement in growth.
Once you get past a certain size, you have very different sorts of problems. Any idiot can vibe code a facebook lookalike, but the real one has to handle hundreds of millions of users and posts while being a target for state actors.
TLDR; yes you do need that many
You absolutely do not. what do you think about the website we are using right now! It has half of the problems listed above.
Your work project doesn’t have a billion users.
We were talking about what it would take to fix the technical problems resulting from taking a working program to something people use.
> Any idiot can vibe code
I didn’t say that either.
How is it the HN opinion that it’s impossible to make a web application a lot of people use?
What actually happens in a startup is you encounter these problems one at a time as they arise.