I mean, I run a startup not doing that much worse.

I have 0 accountants (pay CPA yearly for tax work). 0 lawyers. 0 devops. 0 QA. 0 monitoring . 0 HR.

I do have : 3 devs (if I include myself) 3 support (tickets) 2 other supporting roles

If I coded 100% myself (which I have in the past and could in the future, it would just mean less new features) and had a way to not answer tickets (like the OP story it sounds like due to product complexity), I could totally do this alone…

It’s amazing how lean you can be in SaaS if you must. Us bootstrappers know this.

So much if a modern enterprise is bloat.

You have how many DBAs? How many QA? Lol.

That might be SAAS. The other side of the coin is not the same. You do a multi year multi million dollar deal with a fortune 100, don’t expect 0 lawyers, 0 CPA’s.

You hire a lawyer for that specific work. At $14M ARR, you can afford to hire one when needed. They don't have to be a full-time employee. Same goes for accounting or any other operational staffing. Part-time or project-based contracting works great for such things.

Right, it would be insane to have a full time lawyer (or HR or Monitoring or DevOps) at that size.

At $600 an hour you can likely do all your legal work in 0-10 hours a year.

So you are 8 people. Quite a lot different than a single person.

If you had a way to not answer tickets, that means you would not offer support to customers, so likely a lot less customers would be interested to pay you. You don’t get to 14 millions by cheaping out that way.

I run a SaaS, quite similar numbers to the parent. Depending on the complexity of your support tickets, it's pretty easy to outsource to part-time freelancers. I just pick up the tickets that they flag as too difficult for them. (Edit: we're still quite some ways off $14M, but I could see it scale there without changing the structure much)

Right, its a different product though.

He has a low support required product. But I can 100% imagine making a product without much support required, and running it. Tis not hard.

More like you end up with minimal staffing a la floqast for example.

Dev and devops shouldn't be separate people anyway. If your devops person isn't also working on the product you're doing it wrong (in my only slightly educated opinion).

There is a literal order of magnitude difference between a SaaS product generating $14MM AAR/employee and your situation.

No lawyer or bookkeeper is a terrible idea. But they don't need to be FTEs.

My bet is employees here refers to full-time salaried employees.

No doubt they work with contractors and freelancers. The article even says they have "a few people to write content for the blog".

Those need to be managed, I would definitely hire someone to manage and to load off stress yourself.

Get one of those people to manage the group. You call it the lead role, and pay them sightly more. You don't need a dedicated manager.

Yeah, but if those things were outsourced that would support the “1 full time employee“ claim.