This is not your average company to work for. We are a very small team fighting Google. We make the internet a little better by adding privacy-friendly analytics. You will have a ton of ownership, and to get an idea of who you are dealing with, check out the video [1].
Hacker News gave us our first 30 customers through this post [2]. We have always had warm feelings for this community. This salary is not high in the US, but feel free to apply if it meets your expectations.
- Features (like bypassing ad-blockers [1], see which tweets got traffic [2], events, ...)
We have customers like banks and governments who really care about the privacy part. Most of our customers use our tool because it has a very simple interface. One thing that also plays a big role is the likability of the brand. People seem to like it and are willing to pay money for its mission. We even had customers that didn't use our tool but where actively keeping the subscription active.
Thanks! The hosting costs are a little higher than normal. We moved our servers recently and are paying double for some little ones. We are using a bare metal server for our main database and app. That works very well for us an it doesn't hit any limits.
We use a Dell R240 1x Intel Xeon E-2174G with 64 GB RAM and 2x480GB SSD in RAID 1. We didn't want to use Linode or Digitalocean because they are not based in Europe which has the best privacy laws in place.
When working alone on the project I feel like the momentum gets lost sometimes. Sometimes I'm busy building a feature that takes a lot of time and don't have time for other features or bugs. Or when working on marketing there is no time to build new stuff. There might be a future when I'm not coding at all and only responsible for the other aspects of the business. That's why I'm already hiring a freelancer.
The hiring process did go like this:
- We posted a tweet along the lines of "We are looking for a Node.js programmer to fight for privacy. 8 hours per week for $1000 per month" [1]
- We got ~150 responses via Twitter DM
- We write them all back with a form they needed to fill in
- ~80 of those did fill in the form
- From those we selected 5 applicants to do a paid assignment
- From those we selected 2 for a video call
- Then Dave [2] was selected
To us it's very important to treat your applicants in a very nice way. Take time to respond their questions, let them know why they were not selected and pay for their assignments. We got a lot of great feedback for applicants who didn't got selected because of this.
Although we are still in the starting phase (he started in January) I'm very happy with the output our developer Dave produces.
Good point. I also didn't include my own fee. I guess profit is kind of what I get at the moment. We are planning on sharing our profit with our freelancer when it hits a certain level.
We use it because we want it to be a common term for startups. We copied it from @levelsio who tweeted about it [1].
According to wikipedia the use of the trademark symbol indicates an assertion that a word, image, or other sign is a trademark; it does not indicate registration. It's not super relevant for our page though.
When working alone on the project I feel like the momentum gets lost sometimes. Sometimes I'm busy building a feature that takes a lot of time and don't have time for other features or bugs. Or when working on marketing there is no time to build new stuff. There might be a future when I'm not coding at all and only responsible for the other aspects of the business. That's why I'm already hiring a freelancer.
Normally the freelancer would work 1 day a week which is about half the time he worked in January. Not sure if I would consider it as essential though, because I can always take over and do it all myself. But I'm not planning to do it all myself.
Freelancer costs will not scale as much as traffic would scale. As the work of the freelancer is related to new features. Most of our systems can handle a lot of traffic and if we can't anymore we need to add more hardware (which will be recurring) or write some software (which is not recurring).
As for recurring gross margin. Would a list/graph of recurring costs be sufficient? Combined with the monthly recurring revenue of course.
We always have been open about our metrics as we are building a company based on trust. This time we went a step further and did break down our revenue and costs. We did go through all our transaction to build the chart you see with the last 4 months. We divided the costs up by banking (Stripe), hosting, services and freelancers.
If there are any numbers missing, please let us know. We would love to add more data points that interest you.
– founder Simple Analytics [0]
[0] https://www.simpleanalytics.com