[jumperabg]

Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase?

Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?

[laborcontract]

Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two.

Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised

I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing, distribution, that makes the business so hard. Marketing and sales, in isolation, I've had success with in prior jobs. I'm a fairly productive solo developer.

However, being able to context switch and do both dev and marketing? Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it.

[jezzamon]

For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.

[lelandfe]

After Windows, Stardew Valley was ported to consoles by other companies, like Chucklefish, Sickhead Games, and The Secret Police (not dev work but console Q&A was handled by others too, as was localization).

Barone is still a beast, just making sure the "one guy did the whole thing" thing has some nuance.

[RenThraysk]

Flappy Bird had 50m+ installs.

[grog454]

> Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase?

My game Nebulous was 1.5 devs (one full time one part time) and multiple millions of MAU. 9.5 years later it's still going well.

> when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it

Delete bad code. Replace with good code. Sounds simple enough but in my experience at mega and mid corps, step 1 is almost never done. Whether that's because of ego or chasing local optima I'm not sure - probably a mix of both.

[cbm-vic-20]

It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.

[noprocrasted]

> Delete bad code. Replace with good code

Your points are valid but there's also the issue that the more developers you have the more communication overhead there is, which makes large changes to the codebase hard/impossible.

With a handful of devs you can jump on a call, brainstorm for an hour or two and come to a mutual agreement, then one can submit a several-thousand-line PR refactoring the whole thing and nobody would bat an eye.

This kind of coordination is impossible in larger teams, if anything just because everyone is busy and can't afford to spend a couple hours brainstorming + subsequently get acquainted with the new code, but also because the more people the more opinions and mismatched incentives (bad or overly complex code might imply busywork which some people thrive on, so refactoring it to no longer require said busywork is a downside in their eyes).

[dowager_dan99]

I go further and simplify: "delete code" whenever and where possible. The term "Tech Debt" is really overloaded; I think the idea that "all code is liability" is better for framing the issue and strategies.

[Consultant32452]

I have no incentive to delete bad code and replace it with good code when doing megacorp work. For things I own, it's situational.

[moritonal]

Fleet commander or I'm guessing .IO?

[open592]

From a long time ago (~2009) but this comment instantly reminded me of the gem which was Plenty Of Fish

https://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/

"POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day"

[TheJoeMan]

Thank you for sharing! Only issue with the article I see is that "CPM" is already "cost per mille (thousand)". So any lines such as "$15 per CPM" make me hesitate.

[imachine1980_]

Lichess is one guy for the web and server and one guy for the mobile app Cool video about the topic https://youtu.be/7VSVfQcaxFY?si=UP5txyUCoYYY024h

[insane_dreamer]

While not as tiny, Craigslist has a huge user base all over the world and still has less than 50 employees total (not just devs). IMO it's the poster child of being able to scale worldwide while keeping the product highly focused, highly operational, and avoiding feature and technical fluff.

[vanviegen]

From what I can tell, craigslist is not really a player outside of the US. Just about every country seems you have its own 'craigslist'.

[insane_dreamer]

Another interesting point is that Craigslist has $10-20M revenue / employee (depending on the numbers you read), compared with Apple at $2M/employee (maybe nVidia has more these days, but not consistently)

And it has a founder who gives away most of his money instead of joining the monetize-everything-billionaire-$$hole club

(No affiliation with Craigslist; just like Craig's story, much like I do Nadia's).

[skizm]

Instagram and WhatsApp (pre-acquisition) were both pretty legendary for how small their teams were vs how many users their apps had. Instagram had 13 employees, and WhatsApp had 55 employees at the times of their sales.

[julianeon]

In Instagram's case I think it was very clear they were "borrowing from the future": they were accumulating a lot of technical debt and continuing to pile it on. It was not sustainable. The goal was to either hire more or get acquired. When the latter happened, the codebase quickly benefitted from the work of many more Facebook engineers.

[zerkten]

Stack Overflow was an example of this. They had a relatively small dev team and they also maintained a very small hardware footprint for delivering their product. Over time they expanded their scope into products beyond the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites which seems to have increased their team size.

At least a big part of their success was containing technical by avoiding product debt. They had a clear vision and very tight control of their product which is different from 99% of startups. They were experimenting but not throwing any crap at the wall which was never cleaned up or iterated on.

There was a very strong product-engineering connection and alignment which is unusual. Misalignment there is the genesis of much tech debt. Many product features are thrown out with little iteration to get them right but use "shipping so we can iterate" as an excuse to throw them out to users.

[steventruong]

Eric Barone as a one man team built, designed, animated, wrote, and composed the entire game of Stardew Valley by himself.

The game sold over 30 million copies and had an all time high of over 230K concurrent players at one point earlier this year.

[schneems]

IIRC urbandictionary is/was a one man show, Aaron Peckham. Deployed on Heroku https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-xl (post from 2014, not sure if he is still a customer).

[InsideOutSanta]

It's not a small team, but Valve seems to have a very similar proportion of employees to users. I think they have about 400 employees, and a user base of 140 million. That's roughly 3 employees per million users.

[mikepurvis]

They’re running a marketplace though, and that’s a bit of a special case — obviously why VCs are always very excited for anything that is or looks like it might able to become marketplace-shaped.

Certainly there aren’t 140M MAU fore the steam deck or any of the games they’ve built themselves, that’s for sure.

[piva00]

WhatsApp pre-acquisition by Meta was also very lean, some 40-50 people total serving 200 MAU.

[jedberg]

We had ~10M users on reddit with three engineers and one non-engineer. Got up to about ~20M with five eng and two non-eng.

[eek2121]

I owned a website with over a million users.

Used cloudflare and a $20 cloud instance to run it. Also relied on certain other CDNs.

Don’t own it anymore, but considering starting a new project.

[huma]

What was the app about?

[philipwhiuk]

Dwarf Fortress is another obvious one - basically small successful indie games are all gonna be this.

But that's not a VC product market.

[BehindBlueEyes]

If we're counting all successful indie games, we could extend that to successful modern artists? I'm not familiar but I'm sure there are some that sell a painting or sculpture for millions, though that's just one buyer. Is there an equivalent in indie Movies? Successful musicians?

[eucki]

Pieter Levels is creating the kind of software I’ve always dreamed of building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg

[0______0]

Thanks for mentioning him. I gained some new perspective and felt inspired by looking around at his work and Twitter.

[kbutler]

Minecraft?

Not sure how big it was before Notch hired anyone else, but this reddit post encouraging him to hire somebody says he'd "brought in $67,903,100.72"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/kbiuv/notch_youv...

[noprocrasted]

It turns out you can go quite far when your objective is to solve a business problem rather than building an overcomplicated mess to solicit VC money.

[PaulHoule]

I got a voice chat service for Brazil to nearly 500,000 users as a single dev. Of course we co-branded somebody else's application but I made the user database, sign up systems, contests and other web-based parts.

[kumarm]

Started on Android Market in 2010. First hire (designer) after 12 Million downloads and started hiring other Dev's after crossing 50 Million downloads. Still run decently popular apps on App Store and Play Store.

[rwmj]

Support would be the biggest thing, especially if the website needed any kind of login, payment, or user contributions. Back when we ran a website for UK schools (so, probably 50K-100K users maximum), we only answered support calls or emails during UK working hours, and still needed a 2-3 member team doing that. That was a shoestring even at the time. Nowadays just the safety aspect of running a service for children would demand something larger.

[npinsker]

Mobile games can often scale to eye-popping numbers. Among Us has over 1 billion downloads and was made by a single programmer. Plenty of other examples -- e.g. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JindoBlu.O..., a solo dev who has multiple 100MM+ download small games.

[OJFord]

WhatsApp & Instagram were I think both very small teams with very many users when Facebook bought them (I think was FB not Meta at the time) for very much money.

Which maybe goes some way to your second question, as they were slightly and slowly scaled up versions of solo serving 1M. (And obviously have continued that under FB/Meta with probably now a much less impressive/unusual staff:user ratio.)

[dheera]

I don't know StoryGraph's story, but it's a lot easier if:

- You don't take VC money

- You are okay with it not becoming a billion dollar unicorn

- You are okay with occasional downtime (this isn't being deployed in a hospital emergency room after all)

- You don't plan to feature bloat it

- You are okay with it living its life and eventually being out-competed

I had a webapp once with 250K monthly active users for several years (Fooplot). I was the sole developer. It eventually got increasingly out-competed by VC-funded Desmos and eventually got involuntarily shutdown when AWS decided to stop supporting EC2 classic instances. But I just let it be. Its ad revenue made me a good amount of side income when I was a PhD student. It had frequent downtime when people would try to export an overly complicated graph, which would crash the server. I just restarted it when I noticed. Sometimes it would be a few days later. It died eventually when AWS terminated it. I moved onto other things.

Yeah, I wasn't the best maintainer, but the ~$30K I made from its ad revenue over the years was a pretty good payout for about 10 hours of work.

[mdswanson]

My one-person indie company released many apps, and one of them (Halftone) had over 6 million users by the time I shut it down. It's definitely possible.

[BehindBlueEyes]

Interested to hear why you shut it down when you had over 6 million users?

[bcrosby95]

Back in the Facebook app days we had some apps with 2-8mil daily unique users on anywhere from 1-3 devs and team sizes anywhere from 2-5.

[gwd]

I mean, SQLite is what, 4 developers? And it's by some estimations is one of the top five deployed software modules of any description:

[1] https://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html

[mattgreenrocks]

Write good enough code that can be easily replaced. It really is no different than what you'd write on the job.

[ffsm8]

Whatsapp pre Facebook. It has reportedly around 50 employees at acquisition, and 450 million users at the time.

[stronglikedan]

> when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes

Tech debt doesn't come because the business requires more coding. It comes from poor planning and rushed implementation, often spurred by overzealous and naive management.

This is a small team with one dev, so they likely do things correctly from the start and don't acquire much if any technical debt. Nothing has to be done yesterday, ever.

[vergessenmir]

Tech debt is a function of your code base, it's age, team turnover and number of pivots. Many factors to consider but I'll focus on pivots.

You can't plan for a pivot because it's a known unknown. The same way you can't plan for a specific financial event in the market but you can brace yourself for a category of scenarios. Even with that, you can't predict the impact or the appropriate response your business needs to take.

In the same way so is the pivot. The nature of the pivot is the market revealing the debt you didn't know you had. The magnitude of that readjustment to the market, in the time it has to happen and the time to the next pivot is unknowable because it's information not present at design time.

[hoppp]

Exactly. Technical debt often comes when a lot of developers work on the same codebase. Everyone contributed and nobody refactors.

If the project is well thought out in advance a single developer is enough and will do perfect code

[edm0nd]

>Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase?

Tons of FOSS projects.

See the entire JiaTan fiasco.

[insane_dreamer]

Pinboard probably

[burkaman]

Pinboard peaked at about 30,000 users: https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1810893626274128048/photo/1

[CM30]

Uh, do online content creators count for this? Because an awful lot of popular YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/whatever accounts would probably fit a similar profile. Small team, perhaps even just one person, but million of viewers tuning in every week or so.

The very biggest have decent sized teams (like Mr Beast), but there are plenty in the 100s of thousands/low millions of subscribers/followers range that are operated by between 1-4 people.

And yeah, games too. Quite a few big indie games have that sort of team size/setup.

[cactusplant7374]

Basecamp has always been a good example of that.

[tptacek]

Basecamp has a full-sized team and has for many, many years.

[akreal]

Telegram?