there's certainly benefits to having a small staff (the main one being "relatively reduced expenses"1) but i really fucking wish we could afford to hire more people.
a major caveat to only having two software devs is that we have to be pretty selective about what major projects we take on. everything has to be either Extremely Desired by users or Directly Revenue Generating2. we don't have the flexibility to experiment, try new shit, etc. we operate in the unfortunate paradox of being an Alternative Social Media Platform Operating On Nonstandard Ideals and Not Actually Being Able To Try New Shit Because We Don't Have The Resources.
i see something like tumblr's Communities feature (in secret development but behind a feature flag it's not quite that, read the comments, thanks @twilight-sparkle for documenting it) and my immediate response is "man i really wish we could throw someone at shit like that." if we had the people, i would have wanted us to start working on features to allow for reddit-style communities two weeks ago, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg; there is so much we want to do that we just can't because we don't have the resources to do it without neglecting the other work that needs to happen.
as i've said before, there's also the disproportionate impact that health and personal issues have with such a small team. in an ideal world, asks would have been done a few weeks ago, but i haven't been able to meaningfully work on them in two weeks due to health and personal issues.
these are all consequences of how we've chosen to finance and run the company. we are always going to be at a competitive disadvantage against VC funded companies (which are able to burn money effectively forever) and open source projects (which are dependent on free labor and thus don't need money to burn). if i had the option, i wouldn't change those decisions. but man i would love to have some more financial flexibility here.
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i say "relatively" here because we're still nowhere close to profitable/sustainable. our revenue currently only covers about one employee3, and that's only if we ignore other operational costs4.
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as much as i hate to admit it, we do need money to live
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full financial update coming this week btw, sorry that's taken so long.


