The main learning I took away from growing from 20 to 250ish employees, 1 product to multi-product and 1 geo to multi-country:
As a startup, your speed of execution is a function of your simplicity.
It's about your only advantage over the big players.
Adding employees, adding products, and adding new markets increase your complexity non-linearly. ie. Going to 1 product to 2 products doesn't increase complexity by 2x, it increases it by 4x.
Avoid this complexity if you can: it makes you slow, makes you hire middle management, and makes what could/should be simple decisions, multi-dimensional.
So the lesson: stay as simple as you can for as long as you can.
If you can't stay simple, don't underestimate the exponential drag of complexity.
I have a pleasant little workflow maintaining a content-based website. I'd like to hire help, but offloading work to a first employee feels like more effort than just doing the work myself.
How do I transmit 7 years of tacit knowledge, principles and best practices to someone else so that they do good work? How do I teach a writer to use my elaborate static site generator setup that was never designed for other users?
Then comes the paperwork, and the inherent difficulty of working with other people instead of having full control over everything.
So far, I have just accepted that my work has a limited scope, and that as long as I'm satisfied with my income I don't need to change that.
> that as long as I'm satisfied with my income I don't need to change that.
That is the key thing. I was a 1 person consulting/contracting shop for years and it 100% put limits on my income. But they were limits I was happy to accept.
If you are interested in trying to grow, I'd think of 1-2 tasks you can cleave off and hire someone to do part time. Have them be:
- not critical path
- async
- checklist oriented
You'd be surprised at the number of folks that would be willing to help you out. And you'd learn something about whether you feel comfortable outsourcing such tasks.
Break it down into manageable chunks. Do you have things documented?
I felt this way at first when I was doing my lead generation. I documented the process and brought on someone from the Philippines. I then ran into a similar situation where there were a lot of questions that I couldn't spend my time on. So, I built a GPT to help answer questions and to build another me to help them. This was simple and saved a ton of time.
Reflect on the tasks you are doing and pass off the work that you don't want to do first. Start small and continue passing off more work. You can hire a virtual assistant for $5-8 an hour, and it's beneficial to have some basic support. I also helped motivate someone who needed work.
It doesn't take much effort, let me know if you have questions on the tools and documents you would need to support something like this. I can share what I used.
You will be suprised how quickly people learn and delegation is a forcing function to make things simpler. If they are good they will help you figure out how to make things simpler.
Well, at some point in your personal and professional life, you need to learn to let go, hand over, or pass on your responsibilities to the next person so that you can take on bigger, more critical challenges. Yes, it will take time, and no, they won't be your copycats, but you never know—they will make things easier for you and even better for your business.
As with most things - it depends. Hard to give you a clear cut answer without knowing a lot more.
For us, multi-country added a lot of complexities because we expanded from the UK to Australia. So we needed to staff and integrate different teams (which is where most of the complexity was).
If you're a pure SaaS with no sales GTM, I think it would be a lot simpler if you can stay centrally operated.
This is the bigger reality. It’s turned almost all business and academic writing into long-winded meaningless trash. Well, more than it already was I guess. It seems that the way people use it is to expand few bits of information into many bits of content to convince others that work was done. It’s like the Turing test for laziness. The other issue is that it tends toward agreement on anything it wasn’t trained to specifically disagree about. I can see a smarter and more disagreeable bot doing much worse on LMSys than the sycophant models. Nothing new there I guess. But it’s spilling over to human norms as well, in that previously normal human deviation from chat model style interactions is anomalous, so everybody has to use the AI, and therefore nobody is providing any more value than the LLM, so everybody is getting laid off, except the disagreeable guy, and he gets fired first. It’s hacking us in the positive reinforcement vulnerabilities, ones that get worse the more they’re exploited, but it has none of the human resource constraints that previously kept them in check.
Interesting approach. I wonder if you could ping the iCloud servers to figure out if an email is associated to an iCloud account (I.e. for FaceTime validation). But imagine it's pretty locked down...
Wow I just got done integrating NextAuth. I will totally switch to this if you can support my mobile API. My nextjs app has some API routes used by my native iOS app. It was a bit of a hassle with NextAuth and I was surprised at the lack of support and demand for it (am I crazy for using next for a mobile API? I don't think so). If you support that use case (I didn't see anything in the docs), that would be great. I'm already done with the iOS portion, which basically stores the
Looks really nice! Really need Remix and Tan-Stack support though - these are taking a lot of market share from Next.js because they have less confused models.
I think it shouldn't be too hard. I could even add Remix support for you if you wanted to do a contract (I am not able to do major open source work for free right now.)
- Clerk: ok for small scale applications but they're a small company 'moving fast and breaking things'. It's not stable enough for a enterprise grade product that needs robustness.
- Auth0: Good but can get expensive
- WorkOS: Good for B2B, especially if 'directory syncing' is important for your usecase
pocketbase, lucia auth, there are so many options that won't meter you for MAU for a user table in your database.
authentication is critical, you shouldn't be outsourcing this stuff anyhow. learn how to harden your box, use cloudflare tunnel and dont store passwords in plaintext.
its really not hard to do and constantly being gaslighted into paying someone to do it for you because everybody else is doing it is just irresponsible.
Very much agree with your attitude here. What happens is that nice to have features like email reset/email magic login/social logins/etc accumulate and you don't want to be on the hook for implementing them all yourself, especially with other priorities. Ofc there are open solutions for most of these in most popular languages, but I've found even those take non-trivial amounts of time to setup right and test, and often aren't exactly what you want, or have unnecessary complexity.
I respect your view. I'm not involved with Lucia btw but i do feel v2 covers a lot of those edge case you described and for almost all sub 100k concurrent sessions I find pocketbase deliver here (if anybody is interested).
I guess one clear difference is the lack of a marketing department from something well funded. I recall another HN comment here that said the best business model is to take something people can do already and mark it up by selling the pain points, that could be whats also helping all these auth as a service vendors.
Try and reframe those 8 hours of "wasted time investigating" as an opportunity to:
- learn something
- explore different parts of the codebase
- think about new/different problems to solve
...and try and enjoy the ride.
Small companies do tend to thrash around, but it's pretty unavoidable and often can be a small companies competitive advantage. Doesn't make it any easier, I appreciate.
That's a pretty cynical view....besides, big companies would take months/years to to copy an idea - even if it's a good one - and by then the market has moved.
As a startup, your speed of execution is a function of your simplicity. It's about your only advantage over the big players.
Adding employees, adding products, and adding new markets increase your complexity non-linearly. ie. Going to 1 product to 2 products doesn't increase complexity by 2x, it increases it by 4x.
Avoid this complexity if you can: it makes you slow, makes you hire middle management, and makes what could/should be simple decisions, multi-dimensional.
So the lesson: stay as simple as you can for as long as you can. If you can't stay simple, don't underestimate the exponential drag of complexity.
Hope that's helpful