Recently on an online forum, somebody posted this about Schedulefly: “It seems like a one man show.” The connotation is that being a one man show is a bad thing. And maybe if your software is complicated and your customers need a lot of help, then perhaps that is a bad thing. How could you possibly take care of all of them? But here’s my response to that post:
“We’re not a 1-man show. We’re a 3-man show. We purposely made Schedulefly simple, intuitive, and flexible, so we wouldn’t have to have a bunch of people to provide customer support. We don’t have many customer support requests, and new customers rarely need any training. We also don’t have sales people. You can learn more about the three of us and our philosophies on the About Us link on our site.”
To this point, check out this amazing graph:
It’s relevant because while Google has 20,000 employees, and Amazon has 24,300, and Yahoo has 13,900…..Craigslist has 30. (http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet). That’s right. 30. They have over 50 million users in the U.S. alone, and over 20 billion monthly page views, and they are a $100 million business. With just 30 people.
Now I’m not comparing Schedulefly to Craigslist, but I do believe passionately and very, very confidently that we can grow our business significantly with just a few people. We have three people now, and my guess is we will have no more than four people two or three years from now. More specifically, we have around 30,000 end users right now. We could serve 300,000 users with four people.
The message here is if you keep things simple, you won’t need to hire tons of people, and that’s an accomplishment, not a problem! The Craigslist team is proud to be small. So are we – and we’ll be very proud to be not much bigger than a “one man show” for many years to come.
Keepin’ It Incredibly Simple,
Wil