I don't know about anyone else, but I'm leery of apps that say "proven security and compliance" and then don't offer any obvious details, or proof, about what that "compliance" is. ISO 27001, SOC2, what?
Clicking through on the link under that section explains that they're compliant with GDPR, Privacy Shield, CCPA, and HIPAA on the privacy side. In addition, they've completed SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3 compliance, have a link to security assessments/penetration tests/cryptographic analysis done in 2020 and 2018 by third party pentesting firms. For each of their claims, they've got links explaining details, and if none of that is enough, it's completely open source, so you can go code spelunking yourself to verify their claims.
Having done the same thing myself (bootstrapped a services company from $0 to over $8M/year in revenue in 5 years and grown a SaaS product from $0 to ~$800k ARR in 16 months completely bootstrapped), you can go into debt for a short time while bootstrapping, but generally not 3.5+ years unless you are independently wealthy or have a retirement nest egg you've been saving for a few decades you're prepared to liquidate.
At some point your access to capital dries up when banks see your level of risk increase. You might be able to survive moderate losses for a year or two and cover it with personal debt financing, depending on how much money and access to capital you have personally, but 3.5 to 4 years covering losses with personal debt is REALLY pushing it. You're most likely talking several hundred thousand dollars at that point even for a small startup.
And $1M ARR is only enough to support a team of 9 if the average salary being paid is around $50k-$55k/year (or if 2 or more people aren't even drawing a salary). Which makes sense because, in their blog, they describe hiring someone for marketing that was much less "senior" - i.e. cheaper - and not being happy with it. Taxes, fees, registrations, legal/accounting, benefits (if any), insurance, hosting, technical infrastructure, etc. can easily eat up over $300k/yr for a team of 9 - not including direct payroll.
42 employees, or thereabouts. Biggest driver of revenue was focusing on an industry that buys everything in bulk - services, software, you name it. The federal government. It took two years of laying groundwork to get our first few contracts then took off from there. Biggest mistake we made was twofold - one, hiring too early in the beginning (we used a small amount of debt initially paying salaries for "overhead" people, like marketing, sales, consultants, etc., that simply didn't work out or were far too inexperienced) and, two, giving a substantial amount of equity to someone who was intended to be a cofounder type but was a paid employee, didn't put any money into the business (but took plenty out), and didn't have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Key lesson: choose your partner(s) and employees wisely.
Any organization that reaches a certain size will encounter things like this. The larger an organization gets, the more the productivity level tends to regress towards the mean. So, people with higher productivity will likely feel unfulfilled and people at the lower end will still feel inundated. It is both a mechanism of success and a detriment to such organizations. Successful because it standardizes things, ensuring more consistent quality and productivity overall - the end goal, after all, is to eliminate uncertainty as much as possible in daily operations. Detriment because, pertaining to the the consistency of quality and productivity, it tends to regress at a lower level.
The salaries tend to be higher simply because these large organizations are typically much better capitalized, not necessarily because the people that work there are that much better than everyone else. This is why a lot of high performers tend to strike off on their own at some point in their careers - dissatisfaction with mediocrity. But then their own companies, if successful, grow to a level where, once more, productivity and quality regresses towards the mean and they find themselves in a self-created bureaucracy as the organization matures.
No, you are not. :) People have been looking at dark words on white paper for quite a while now with no ill effects, and I’ve never felt an inclination to invert the relationship. Even in 1980 I preferred the very few CRT terminals that operated in “light mode”.
The current environment is nothing like the dot-com boom. The dot-com boom/bust was driven by public markets, whereas now the public markets are the ones who are filtering out the wild valuations now before it gets out of hand and throws the country into a recession like it did last time.
I suspect that a lot of people here would be surprised at how many people have never even heard of a lot of the tech (or "tech") companies that are so prominent in industry's awareness.
One example. I saw a stat a month or so ago that something like 63% of Americans had never taken an Uber. I'm sure the vast majority have never heard of WeWork.
Yes, some of these companies are now public. But this isn't a matter of a whole industry having a major downturn. It's mostly companies that are well-known in some circles but are pretty inconsequential in the scheme of things.
I was genuinely interested in this but saw some issues in the pricing. The "starter" is for "up to 100 users" but then the "Organization Wide" plan is for 500 users and over. What happens in the gap between 101 and 499 users? Also, Office 365 integration is only available for companies with over 500 users, which makes it not really useful for me - I want (need) that integration, but would only have about 60 users. So, for those reasons, I had to pass. Everything else looked great, but there is a huge gap in features and pricing for small to mid-sized companies not yet at the 500 mark.
Thanks for your honest feedback, really helpful.
We provide the 365 integration for any size of customer, our pricing page just reflects what typical asks are at each size. For example, many large companies want to kick off a quick pilot of 1-200 people before rolling out, and don't want to bother their IT team.
We provide a tiered pricing on usage. If you change your mind, don't hesitate to reach out and we'll sort your plan out.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your target customer. Are you only focused on enterprise?
The pricing comes across as something like "forced obsolescence." Forced handicapping? You might not have meant it that way but many of the features in the professional plan are useful for companies of any size. Like Google apps integration is a standard feature. I could see on-prem SSO (I think Oracle does things like this?) but my company deosn't get automatic calendar invites??
In agreement w/ the comment you're replying to, I wouldn't try this because the base features aren't useful enough and the pricing feels very customer-unfriendly.
If good scheduling is necessary for a mentoring program to be successful (I'm guessing it is), then you shouldn't withhold the feature unless you intend to make lower paying customers less successful with the platform.
Absolutely agree. We as a society have put so much emphasis on earning a college degree that people are attaining worthless ones at too high of a rate and finding themselves buried in debt with no way to pay it off.
It doesn't help that basic financial literacy isn't taught in grade school anymore, either. Too many times, a graduate's first lesson in managing finances and debt comes in the form of a default notice from a lender.
The other problem I see here is that the whole mentality of being able to run away from your problems is, well, problematic. These things will only get worse if you don't address them. What they don't apparently realize is, one day, they're going to want to come back to the U.S. for one reason or another just to find out that their mound of student debt has grown into a mountain of defaults which prevents them from even holding certain jobs, getting credit, finding housing, and basically functioning comfortably in society.
I do think you should be able to declare bankruptcy on worthless degrees. Banks (note that I have a problem with government loan subsidies) should face the risk and not loan to a student getting a worthless degree.
What I can't figure out is how to stop someone who gets a useful degree from declaring bankruptcy right after graduating and then getting a job using that degree. This is fraud.
You never really know when the market would be saturated with degree x since it takes 4 years to earn. On the other end banks may decline a degree that if taken now will start to be high demand when the candidate graduates.
If you have a electrical engineering degree in generators right before someone discovers a cheap over unity solar panel (coming up with a way to violate the laws of physics is left as an exercise to the reader) thus making all generator specialists valueless - most of your EE course work still applies so you just need pivot a little. Maybe you need an additional year of school to get in demand skills, but the odds that you can't find something that it is a low risk to get you into is low.
If you have a degree in music - we already know that field is saturated. If you studied only music you have a few years left to get a course of study that is useful.
Is the value of some college degree really the problem or does our system and culture just do a horrible job of matching candidates with open positions?
Not true. 23% of all government money goes to small businesses. Over 30% in certain agencies and up to 60% in some. Like I've been saying here, you need to take the time to learn the market because if you don't, you will just believe it is stacked against you when it really isn't and is actually more friendly to smaller companies than certain commercial markets.
My response was in relation to a VC funded startup business, that is very different from the "small business" segment you're referring to.
There are loads of "small business" entities out there who get government business merely by being in existence and meeting the sizing requirements.
I however wouldn't quit my job to start one of these because these are really just people grazing on the federal acquisition process and provide in most cases little to no value, it is not much money either.
I know this because I have experience with working on government projects where you can easily have 20+ contractors involved and it is not clear what their roles or input are to the project.
A large percentage of them are. When starting out many small businesses exclusively work as subcontractors to larger entities which must partner with smaller businesses to meet set asides.
Some contracts require the prime contractor to be a small business. Often when this is the case and the contract is large the small business acts almost purely as a pass through to a larger contractor. Taking a percentage off the top and filling a couple of slots on the contract while the larger contractor does fills most of the slots and takes the majority of the money.
The problem isn't that the process is really broken (though it is in many ways) - the problem is that too many companies fail to understand there is a major difference between government and commercial markets. Two totally different mindsets.
Yes, the sales cycles in government are a lot longer (2 years is at the extreme end though, 3 to 6 months is more average but with a lot of caveats) and yes, there are a lot of rules and regulations that don't exist in commercial deals (FAR, DFARS, etc. etc.) - but at the end of the day, you're talking about business-changing scale when you get awarded a decent sized government contract (millions of dollars over a period of 3-5 years on average or longer). You're talking about being able to grow to 100's of employees with just a half dozen or so government customers.
The problem here really is that people need to invest the time and energy into understanding the government market and they can't expect it to be like the commercial one. If you do this, then the payout is very much worth it (and, no, it doesn't require "deep pockets" but it DOES require relationship building, a strong commitment, and a lot of learning).
If you give up in frustration because "it's too convoluted" compared to the commercial market, then, yeah, it will never pay off and it will feel like everything is stacked against you. But if you stick it out you'll find yourself with some incredibly stable and predictable long-term revenue streams.
I think the concern is that the reason it is so different is disturbing to taxpayers: If it is filled with more bureaucracy than a similar commercial deal, then they're wasting taxpayer money. If that bureaucracy is the only way to prevent corruption, then they must be horribly easy to corrupt. If you can get a guaranteed revenue stream to grow your company to 100s of people with no day to day risk of losing this customer, then they're not being good stewards of that money. In short, them being different in these ways are bad sign for the taxpayers who fund this.
Having worked for a government contractor, it was my impression during my time there that they're so worried about oversight of the money and what miss-spending and corruption looks like that they spend most of the money making sure it doesn't get miss-spent. Often the amount spent recovering miss-spent money far out-weighs the cost of what was miss-spent in the first place.
One example my attention was drawn to is that a government employee overspent by $1.50 for a drink that was misassigned an expense code for the amount they spent. If they'd used the correct expense code or spent $1.50 less, no eyebrows would have been raised. Instead everything was processed and the person was pulled into a tribunal in front of other government employees who were being paid to oversee spending. Lord knows what those employees were paid to investigate this miss-spend. On top of the fact this employee was paid to attend the tribunal. This kind of behaviour is a gross waste of time and money... for $1.50 at a cost of many thousands of dollars to reclaim - or more likely re-assign to the correct expense code... and for what?
If you want to see your tax dollars at work, it's right here, making sure none of your hard earned money gets miss-spent.
It's accountability in the age before we had AIs that could spot strange patterns of behavior across millions of government employees. Presumably now there might be more efficient ways to do this, but it's a combination of inertia and fear of what the consequences would be if such a program didn't work out. The upside of the current system is that it leaves huge paper trails and everything is auditable; the downside is that actually auditing all this stuff is so painful.
It also doesn't really help that a majority of the politicians and a majority of voters foam at the mouth about government waste, no matter how minuscule and how much it would actually cost to eliminate. If we implemented more efficient algorithms and saved 90% of administration but some waste slipped through they'd say the government was getting sloppy. You see this a lot when people rail against, say, fare evasion on public transit; people would rather have 10x of a bunch of highly paid employees to manually check every ticket, instead of having proof-of-payment and random inspections with fines, because it feels like the right thing to do.
That's an experimental YF-22A crashing due to a software glitch. That's a $300-400M hand-crafted state-of-the-art-on-a-hundred-dimensions supersonic jet, almost killing the test pilot (an engineer who flies planes) 50 feet off the ground at 150 mph. Just the cost of training that pilot is easily in the millions of dollars.
Everyone agrees the budget process is nuts, right up until something like that happens. And then everyone who ever signed any document related to that airplane is able to sleep at night. Except the software teams that wrote or approved the code. They're going to loose sleep, and they know why.
Oh, and the DoD is a rounding error compared to CMS. They have routine fraud complaints that would sink a major defense contractor.
I think fraud detection and holding people accountable for safety lapses are two completely different problems calling for different solutions. Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean everything's a nail.
If we didn't spend so much money on fraud detection via immense bureaucracy, that would increase the amount of money available to provision services.
Serious investigations of seemingly-trivial events can produce some startling information.
Look into the ongoing Kealoha scandal in Oahu. One broken mailbox is tearing down a massive criminal conspiracy.
But the bureaucracy is sometimes for good reason (usually driven by Congressional mandate). What people need to do is learn to work within (and around) the bureaucracy. That's key to the government market. There is a reason for the way it is, and you need to learn to work with it instead of fighting against it.
I'm not sure you're understanding really how the system works, which is exactly what I was pointing out in my statement. I never said "guaranteed" - I said "stable". There is ALWAYS risk of losing the customer and the government can terminate at any time for almost any reason. But if you perform, then you can maintain the same customer for a decade or more.
This is how the system works and it works this way for a reason. There is more accountability in the government market than people realize - moreso than in most commercial transactions even.
I think people would be more willing to accept the bureaucracy if it delivered results. If you've ever been the customer of a government tech product (even a public-facing one like healthcare.gov) you know it does not.
Take a look around the world and look at the average state of governance and you will find a lot of appreciation for American bureaucracy.
And it is indeed independent bureaucracies that are responsible for making agencies and institutions run. Bureaucracy gets a bad name in many places, but the alternative to bureaucracy isn't just automatic improvement, it's most often politicization. Which is significantly worse.
Historically, government contracting and the public sector has been incredibly corrupt, as it's basically unlimited funds with no market-based mechanism to address it (in a private entity, the owners will be angry about money taken from their pockets by employees, and in places where corruption is too high, you end up with family firms or other external trust structures, very small entities, etc.)
This is why the heavy-handed regulations exist in US contracting (along with massive risk aversion and other things). The Government uniquely cannot be subject to market forces and punishment for bad actions.
That's true in places like India, but not really in the U.S. I own a company that does government contracting and have never "paid someone off" or done anything remotely "corrupt" but we have been wildly successful nonetheless.
There are NUMEROUS mechanisms for oversight and redress at every level - but the typical commercial-focused company doesn't understand them, so they don't research or learn what they are and just give up thereby developing a very misguided interpretation of the system akin to what you believe it is like.
This was true in the US before we created all these stupid regulations, which is why they were created. 1700s/1800s, "spoils system", etc. That is the whole reason the regulations (and attendant overhead) exist.
(I bootstrapped a US government contractor and have worked for several others.)
Can you clarify your point, were you saying that the US had 3rd world-levels of corruption before the regulation, or were you saying that the US was as fine as it is today, before the regulations.
The former- before the regulations in the 1800's there wasn't even really a concept of 'third-world levels of corruption' as it was universal to every government.
I've worked for commercial, government and semi-government organizations. It's not corrupt in the sense that it's illegal. The problem is that while the stakes are high within the private sector there are no such stakes within the government sector. Yet people do get payed high stakes salaries. There's no incentive for efficiency. In the government realm when the end of year is nearing, departments start burning through their budgets to ensure they don't receive less the next year. Inefficiency is rewarded. It simply means more people get to pay for nice mortgages.
> If that bureaucracy is the only way to prevent corruption, then they must be horribly easy to corrupt.
The bar is much higher for government procurement, though. As an example, if I decide to use Codacy as my static analysis tool at work because I know the founder, nobody would bat an eyelid. If that same dynamic were reproduced at the government level, it would amount to corruption.
From what I gathered when I got an offer for a government contract position: the company has an idea of how many people they want to hire (or things they want to buy) to fulfill the contract.
This can involve making "contingent offers" to get people interested, which to my knowledge carry no actual legal weight and is really just an informal agreement.
This way, you get a reasonable pool of candidates without actually having to hire anyone.
