Ask HN: How do you quickly test out new product/app ideas? - <AUTHOR> From a technical perspective, how do you validate a new product/app idea? What tools/frameworks/etc. do you use to collect enough information to know if you should invest more time and money? <comment><USER2> 1\. Landing page that shows mockups of your product and how it benefits the audience - capture emails "get notified of launch!"

You can drive traffic to the landing page by sharing it in relevant communities and by setting up some highly targeted ads.

2\. Instead of programming your core feature right away, even as a MVP, if possible, do manual non-scaleable work to offer it instead. This lets you test if people want it, without spending much dev time or money.

Example: "Leading into the summer of 2009, the team developed the first incarnation of FanDuel in a Google Docs spreadsheet, says cofounder and chief product officer Tom Griffiths, who recalls recruiting test players on Craigslist and accepting their entry fees via PayPal"

<comment> murph-almighty I've heard technique 2 described as a "Wizard of Oz" experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked on a Hackathon project that received an award from the sponsor and seemed like a good idea. My team of 4 was stoked and ready to continue building the service but one more experienced dev was hesitant.

He advocated putting up a beta sign up page with some mock images; to wait and see if we were going to get traction.

Sure enough, he was right. We got tweeted by Etsy and expected a rush of sign ups- we only got 1. It was from a guy I met at the airport whom I told about the project.

</comment><comment><USER4> One great way is to focus on personal problems (instead of "ideas"). Solve it in a very hacky way for yourself and then share it with people, see if it helps others. If it doesn't, no big deal, you've solved an annoying problem for yourself without investing too much time. If others like it, then you can see if you want to take it to the next level. Most first-time founders started that way.

Interesting essay on this subject: [http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it helps to list out the core value of your idea and the easiest way you can test out that it actually brings value to your end-user/customer. Alongside of that, you should have assumptions/hypothesis surrounding your idea that can be tested/validated out in the cheapest, quickest way that brings measurable results.

Buffer Box is a great example of a startup that tested out their idea cheaply and quickly: [https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/bytes/e/part-1-the- bufferbo...](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/bytes/e/part-1-the-bufferbox- story-jay-shah-cofounder-45086922)

TLDR; BufferBox was one of the first "Amazon Locker"-services. The problem they solved was "missed deliveries". So they tested (cheaply, quickly and easily) their concept by posting posters everywhere on their college campus promoting a way for people to not miss their deliveries (students always missed deliveries due to classes and this was before the days of Amazon where they just dropped packages in your front door). Students signed up would put in Buffer Box's address and would get their items/products/packages delivered from a team member of Buffer Box. This helped Buffer Box validate there was a need for their service, and that their product ("Buffer Box") would be needed.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would like to know also. I have had one moderately successful product and I am not even sure why it was when others were not. I did put the most amount of effort into it. But since it was a somewhat early app I made out well in the app gold rush period. I have found that "If you build it, they won't come". One thing I have found in the software world is that great amounts of effort is put into features and areas which few people should care about when other great needs are unmet. Why did Apple spend so much time with a feces emoji when we don't have a machine based closed caption service for the hearing impaired yet?

What I would like to see is a website where the public itself develops a product or refines an idea so that a market is already in place before engineering begins. I would love to see someone do this with the Linux desktop. There are zillions of Linux desktops and great effort is put in areas where users wonder "what were they thinking?? We were happy with the way it was!! Why did you change it? Why didn't you put in this feature we all miss from Windows 7 or Mac OS?".

</comment><comment><USER7> The market should already exist for most products. For the iPhone, the market was feature phone users who played Java apps. For a social media app, people should already have created these social groups elsewhere, and those groups would be straining from the poor technology. For SaaS, someone should already have hacked a solution together.

Personally I say figure out your initial market and even your marketing approach before you write any code at all. Get buyers lined up for the product before you build it, preferably with cash on hand, ready to pay you.

Validating a business model also means taking on tons of technical debt. Build your app with PowerPoint or Wix if you have to, just to prove the concept. Don't build the app too much until you have something people are willing to pay for. You'd be surprised how many SaaS are badly built at launch, including Stripe.

</comment><comment><USER8> Two things:

1\. Smoke tests Set up a landing page, buy traffic and see how good it would convert. You can improve on the copy a little bit (value proposition) but you can extrapolate the interest. Also take Google Trends into account.

2\. Directly talk to potential customers. "You don't need a product to sell a product".

</comment><comment><USER9> Build a simple functional prototype (also known as Minimum viable product) and give it away free.

This will start a whole series of next level tasks and some of them you may not even be aware of with just an idea.

Track usage and interest in your prototype and decide whether it is worth building the full product.

<comment><USER10> "Give it away free" is one thing that most of the times gives false results.

<comment><USER11> I completely agree with this. If a product is meant to be free then give it away if you intend on charging some day you need top get people to pay from the start. Even if its a small amount.

Also if users will pay for a buggy prototype then it is clearly something they really want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quick, out of the box solutions with PaaS or BaaS help. I have used Angular with Firebase effectively. It cuts down time for development.

But remember to refactor once your app gains ground.

</comment><comment><USER13> one thing i've heard people doing is making a quick splash page and using it to measure possible attention. You can collect emails with it or simply just monitor traffic.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would like to know too.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Thanks for all your replies. They're really helpful! I'll go through them and reply if necessary.</comment>


GitLab Made $10.5M in Revenue with Every Employee Working from Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-deitch/2018-inc5000-gitlab.html <comment><USER2> I interviewed with them when they were at 40 remote employees (as far as I can recall). Sadly, I lacked the chops they were looking for. But I was thoroughly impressed with how passionately they spoke about their remote culture. I've been remote now for 10 years with 3 different companies, and I'll never go back to an office unless my family is in dire straights. I hope this article gets play, and I hope to see many more like it in the future. Working remotely is still undervalued and niche, and I'd like to see more companies get up to speed and become open to it.

<comment><USER3> Do you have a home office or rent office space? If home office, how is it being around family 24/7? What's the optimal remote working setup in your opinion?

<comment><USER2> I have a small family, and a "home office". My wife works and I take care of the infant. My home has an open floor plan where the kitchen and living room are one in the same, and that's my primary workspace. I'm not a fan of a dedicated room, and I work solely on a laptop - long ago rid myself of elaborate stationary setups, I enjoy taking my laptop into multiple rooms, even outside. When the wife gets home, work typically stops. I'm a night owl and she's an early riser, so I'm not working when she's around in the morning, and I like work at night after she falls asleep. We also have two dogs, which are a JOY to have around during the day.

Having the kid and dogs around, combined with occasional errands and household tasks, provides the exact right amount of distraction and interruption I like to have. I typically only work in 2 hour increments, and then tend to another responsibility, or purposefully head out to do something for an hour. Breaks in the day keeps my mind fresh and oddly enough, allows me to focus more when I sit down to work.

As for what the optimal setup is - that's incredibly personal and subjective, and everyone needs to figure that out for themselves over time.

Some generic advice would be:

\- set at-work time limits \- set off-limits hours where you do not work under any circumstances \- find a comfortable space (that can be anything from a coworking space, to the living room) \- find your perfect "white noise." it can get really quiet at home. having something in the background can help. I personally like to keep netflix running, or a movie streaming.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry but I don't understand, are you saying that you are able to do your work at the same time as taking care of a baby?

<comment><USER5> It is completely impossible to have a real full time job and take care of a child at the same time unless yours happens to sleep the entire time. If this was possible all those moms could just work from home! I can barely work at home without locking the door if children under 5 are in the house and there is another adult taking care of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The GitLab compensation calculator seems really odd. At least personally, when I saw it, it drew almost all of my attention away from the mechanics of the role and towards trying to game this thing in order to get paid comparatively well.

If someone takes a job with a London postcode and then moves a few hours north, what happens? Do they just get docked in pay?

Do you trust them to tell you they've moved house even though they're going to lose tens of thousands a year in income?

I'd considered applying in the past but don't really feel comfortable with the fact that it's not really 'remote' because if I actually live where I want to, I'd get paid peanuts.

Evidently it works for them, but to me it looks like some weird way to push everyone into the expensive cities.

<comment><USER7> >London postcode and then moves a few hours north, what happens? Do they just get docked in pay?

Apparently, stupendously, yes (based on what apparent employees in this thread are saying)

>Do you trust them to tell you they've moved house even though they're going to lose tens of thousands a year in income?

It's in the contract. I would absolutely lie to them, I would 1:1 fiscally motivated to do so.

<comment><USER6> The whole thing baffles me.

I dunno. I'm sure it works if you just take jobs without caring what you get paid.

Maybe that describes most of GitLab's staff. It's a cool product, so it wouldn't surprise me.

The mental overhead of maintaining a London postcode just for the sake of it I think would have me looking elsewhere (and I live in London and have no intention of leaving). I'd be wondering about where they draw the line, and whether if I move two stations out they'd try and dock my pay or whatever.

<comment><USER7> Yea, theres a massive thread above us getting into the weeds about like, the very nature of capitalism, but for me it boils down to a simple issue: I think it's unfair that I get paid more than my equally productive colleague, just because I happen to live in SF and he happens to live in Indiana.

Also nearly entirely defeats the purpose of remote work. I'm into it cause it'd be dank to pull a San Francisco salary while chilling in Vietnam and paying 200$/mo for rent.

<comment><USER8> If you really think it's unfair then you would have moved to Indiana to downward adjust your salary. Sounds like posturing to me.

<comment><USER7> Why does the solution to "something is unfair" necessitate me equalizing the situation on my own? That's some cronyism right there. That's like... I dunno, apologizing to my boss for him firing me for taking a sick day.

The arbiter of the unfairness is the company policy. That's who we blame, not the employee who happens to benefit. They are no more to blame than the person who doesn't benefit. The causal relationship simply doesn't exist. I'm actually curious about the reasoning you applied to somehow pin the duty of responsibility to the employee that benefits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the corporate advantages of 100% remote is the business can pay your team whatever their local market rate is, this is usually a lot less than SF, Seattle, NY etc. Additionally, you can often avoid paying certain benefits if your team member is outside of the US.

This is a huge competitive win for organizations who are willing to organize around remote work. I personally am not sure how I feel about salaries weighted in such a way, partly feel like people doing equal work should be compensated equally since they contribute equally. On the other hand, potential employees are free to accept of turn down an offer and the market will continue to adjust accordingly.

Full disclosure; I've noted elsewhere on HN that I turned down an offer with Gitlab at the final stage because they adjusted the geo-compensation calculation in the late stages of the interview which made the position fiscally uninteresting. I swear I am not bitter :) - I just think that this aspect of the employment strategy is interesting and worthy of dissection as it is probably something we will see more and more with remote positions.

<comment><USER10> IMO a better advantage is that you can hire talent from anywhere, without the caveat that they have to uproot their life to join your team. Paying local market rate is shitty (generally) and reduces your competitiveness against other remote employers that don't try to squeeze 10-40% off employee salaries (which is most of them, FWIW). Not to mention, how could you possibly make 10m rev/employee but with a straight face worry about them making 20k 'too much' because they live in Iowa or something!?

I wouldn't even bother applying at Gitlab because I know they won't pay me competitively. Pass!

TLDR: "can pay local market rates" only works if you're the only company to ever offer remote work, and you have to compete only with other local market offers. Which is a fantasy in 2018.

<comment><USER11> >and reduces your competitiveness against other remote employers that don't try to squeeze 10-40% off employee salaries

Well, duh. Google paying its engineers X instead of X + 100,000 reduces its competitiveness against other employers too. Doesn't mean they should raise salaries by 100k across the board though. Companies pay what they must to attract the workers they need, why would they pay more? They're in most cases not a charity being run for the benefit of the employees. And for remote work, being remote is usually a huge perk for the employee so naturally it comes with a shortfall in somewhere else, such as salary.

<comment><USER10> Sure I agree with your general point, but other remote companies WILL pay more.

I've worked for 3 companies remotely over the past 6 years. Every single one of them, including being employee #8 or so at a seed-round startup paid more than the _max_ Gitlab would pay me for a backend role. Like, in 2012, as employee #10 at a bootstrapped startup, I was paid more. Gitlab pays crazy under market, end of story.

<comment><USER12> GitLab's rate calculations are really off for a few markets... Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta come to mind there. Software Devs do var above the mean income in the area relatively speaking than in other cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Skipping over the little annoying facts that fully remote work is not some secret strategy, and that no Fortune 500 company (as an index of success) is 100% remote, let's just do a direct comparison of competitors:

\- GitLab is 100% remote and, according the article, was most recently valued at $1 billion, 350 employees, and has an unknown/hidden (or I can't find) number of users.

\- Github has a headquarters and also remote work, and was recently acquired for $7.5 billion, with 800 employees and 31 million users.

So...is remote work a secret? Did it lead to a comparative success over a competitor offering similar services but a different organizational strategy? Not really, not even close, no.

More accurately, we should say GitLab has so far managed to make remote work a success for themselves through leadership, organizational culture, and some other actually secret ingredient, which is where the real story lies. Lots of remote companies fail. What has GitLab done right? Sadly, this article only skims the possibilities.

<comment><USER14> Github also had real trouble with their cash flows. MS bought the popularity and the current and future projects that are hosted there (probably overpaid for all that).

Now - why remoting would work better for the company (off the top of my head): 1\. next to zero office-space rental costs 2\. you're going shopping for talent in the whole world and you can hire regardless of visas, eligibility, etc. I.e. you hire better talent, for less money (they don't need to pay outrageous rents for SF/London/Munich/Dublin/whatever) 3\. You get happier employees (they don't get to see their families once every six m onths or so) 4\. You get easier on-calls schedules 24/7/365 if you get a few ppl on different timezones 5\. You get diversity from day 0 and local eyes in almost all markets that you care to sell anything 6\. You _have_ to document more and better since you _have_ to work with tickets 7\. You make your meetings worthwhile because your time matters (and you're not valued or paid according to "chair-time" that can be filled with boring nonsense meetings so that you can coast through the day)

There's a bunch of other advantages in other areas (ecology, general economy, tech, etc) but since the focus is on what's in it for the company I won't go into these.

<comment><USER15> > MS bought the [...] current and future projects that are hosted there

what? microsoft doesn't own any projects hosted on github other than their own

<comment><USER16> It's pretty clear the GP was using that in the sense that one often refers to acquirers buying customers, not in terms of actually buying IP of the projects.

<comment><USER14> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These sorts of articles always excite me that more places will be moving towards remote work, and hopefully using Gitlab as an example. In the past I've had some not so great experiences with remote work.

I've had two remote gigs thus far and the first was pretty horrible. On- boarding took a month (to receive a machine), and I frequently went days without hearing from anyone. There was zero communication even when I attempted to create meetings to talk (since pings were never replied to). It pretty much felt like being on an island - especially when most of your co- workers had worked together for anywhere from 2-10 years. Remote culture didn't really exist at this job.

At my current job it has been great - we use Slack to communicate and there is hardly any radio silence. Before starting, I was told we work to live not the other way around. I received my machine and ~actually~ had an onboarding process. It feels like I'm a part of a team (albeit small) and that makes a world of difference when working remote.

The one thing I haven't fixed yet is being on a routine/schedule. It isn't the best to work, sleep, and relax in the same room every day, but I've been working out of the house more lately which has seemed to help.

<comment><USER18> Getting out of the house makes all the difference for me. Public libraries are a wonderful resource, most have quiet common areas and rooms you can reserve for meetings.

<comment><USER17> I have found that if I don't make it out of the house I am not nearly as motivated as I am when working from a coffee shop or similar.

For me, it's mostly been coffee shops and places to eat. I might start going to a university library that has many free meeting rooms, but that's the closest "large" library near me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I realize they are growing fast but isn't it a little early to declare success (as the title seems to) when you're generating $10.5 million with a cost structure that includes 350 employees?

<comment><USER20> That's exactly what I thought. $10.5M yearly revenues with 350 employees is rather bad.

<comment><USER21> Please see Sid's comment at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014). The numbers are from two separate points in time.

<comment><USER20> Fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hired over 250 engineers at Elastic in 4 1/2 years and helped grow the team and most worked remote and now I'm a Big believer in distributed teams. It worked great at Elastic and now hiring some remote engineers at www.timescale.com

My personal experience in recruiting since 2004 for Engineers, is that some markets like San Francisco, NYC are so so competitive and super expensive to hire, it makes a LOT of sense to think about have completely remote teams or partially remote. There is a lot of technical talent beyond the major markets.

<comment><USER23> How do you manage to sort through all the resumes you must get? Please say you put them in Elastic and have a Kibana dashboard to sort the keywords you want to the top, that would be too awesome :) I had someone internal submit my resume about a month ago but haven't heard a word. I imagine it part of it must be due to the volume of resumes you must get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've always been impressed with how far GitLab has come. At my previous job we switched to GitLab during the period where GitHub felt like it wasn't improving.

While I think GitHub has picked up the slack pretty effectively, I still think GitLab offers a very compelling package. I didn't use the Kubernetes integration, but we definitely used GitLab CI and registry, and a lot of other features that GitHub didn't or still doesn't really have an equivalent for.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't want to berate the fully remote work culture, but $10.5M is small change. Unless we have a multi billion dollar company proving this working model at scale, I will remain skeptic. Also, it is hard to know whether being remote is actually detrimental to Gitlab, considering they are unable to match the success of Github which has physical offices

<comment><USER26> DigitalOcean.

edit: not fully remote but almost, and increasingly

<comment><USER27> Unless this has changed recently, DigitalOcean has a physical office in NYC, so they are not fully remote. When I interviewed there a couple years ago, they said more than half of their engineers were at that office.

Edit: Based on their job postings[0], it looks like they have physical offices in at least NYC, Cambridge, and Palo Alto. I'm not sure what the ratio of remote to on-site personnel is these days, but DO is definitely not a fully remote company.

[0]: [https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/#anchor--current- openin...](https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/#anchor--current-openings)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What many of us fail to notice is not how small revenue is for 350 employees but despite of that - company exists and they are doing really well with the product. Im sure there will be many examples of similar numbers to be found which do not have remote and those companies will be burning a hole for remting real estate and infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER29> Article says that they have ~$10.5M revenues with ~350 employees. That works out to $30,000/employee.

That's really not very impressive. I'm sure this puts them pretty deep in the red (assuming their employees make a good amount more than 30K/year), although they are obviously still in the growth stage. Still, it seems a bit early to be touting this company's success as a remote-first organization though.

</comment><comment><USER30> We've been running TMC (my latest venture, now 10 years old) as a 100% remote company since day one. As of late though it starts to feel like a less-than- ideal solution for the longer term. Our customers expect a company that is more conventional and some of our colleagues have said rather explicitly that they would like to collaborate more closely in an office like setting. What with the rents in and around Amsterdam so far not having an office was one of the advantages we had over competitors.

<comment><USER31> Out of curiosity, is there a reason that your customers want a more conventional setup other than perception? How about those colleagues? Are there legitimate reasons to collaborate in an office? For the latter, maybe the best solution is renting a conference room for those sessions that really need to be in person.

<comment><USER30> Our work involves quite a bit of interaction with the customers and they are all rather very conventional companies themselves.

We do the 'rent a conference room' so frequently now that it starts to approach renting an office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I remember reading that they pay developers based on where they are located so for example developer from SF would get 140k while developer from Minsk would get 50k. Is it still true?

<comment><USER33> Still seems to be true, even within countries the discrepancy is pretty bad. They give the formula, but don't have a calculator, but you can use their "Move" calculator to estimate it:

[https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/move/](https://about.gitlab.com/job- families/move/)

Someone in London who is on £60k would get £35k if they moved to Bristol, or £30k in Brighton. Definitely a lot lower than market rates.

<comment><USER34> The adjustment seems overly aggressive. Salary is proportional to 0.7 * Rent_Index + 0.3, where Rent_Index is normalized to be 1.0 for New York City - so basically they're adjusting salaries as if 70% of your spending goes to rent. They probably should use an index that's a bit less aggressively weighted towards housing costs.

<comment><USER35> We ran linear regressions to see which factor was more statistically relevant between Cost of Living, Cost of Living with Rent Index, and Rent Index. We chose rent index from Numbeo based on those evaluations, which expresses the ratio of cost of rent in many metro areas. Since we are using San Francisco salary benchmarks, we divide by 1.26 to normalize the rent index to San Francisco. We multiply the Rent Index by 0.7 and then add 0.3, so the sum would equal 1 (i.e. we pay San Francisco rates in San Francisco).

<comment><USER34> So where does the 0.7 and 0.3 come from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What is the actual usefulness for github (or gitlab) in a company setting?

In my free time, sure, I can browse github, search for projects, snippets of code, maybe raise some issues or fix something, but where I work, we do have github accounts but I don't think anybody uses the actual interface. We just store our repositories, and then use a git client to pull/push and view the changes, and Jira for tickets. Isn't the value of the product lost in this case or does github offer more than what meets the eye here? I mean, I would guess a simple server would be enough to store the repositories.

<comment><USER37> So this is mostly about Gitlab EE/Github Enterprise in an enterprise setting:

1\. Control of your data. You get to keep your code on your servers and don't have to worry about Github themselves being breached.

2\. PR workflows to enforce code reviews. Also a central place to view them. Also it links to JIRA so you can go from a ticket to a code review.

3\. Finding internal clients (more useful for big companies were you might not know all of them). "Hey, there's a security bug in InternalLib 3.5 and we need everyone to update to 3.6. Who's using it?". Hey, who owns/uses "m-asd- indexer.dc1.mycompany.com".

4\. Familiarity. Most devs these days are at least aware of how open source github workflows work, as opposed to email + patches or other approaches.

5\. Global search. "Oh, hey, InternalProcessor 4.6 is doing something odd when we call internalDooDad.foo(bar) . Let's go search for that and figure out if we can understand the behaviour". "Hey, we've standardised on service X for access control, how have other projects integrated it?"

<comment><USER38> How do they help with #3?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone have any more information on what sort of structure, organization cultural things can be put in place to help a company function fully remote?

<comment><USER40> Hello, Community Advocate from GitLab here. Thanks wjohnsto for sharing a link to our Handbook.

I'd love to share our "All Remote" page as well. [https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all- remote/](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/).

There you can read how remote work is changing the workforce, how it changes the organization, advantages for employees and organizations and what did we learn about remote working.

Additionally, our blog page is the great place to learn about our culture and remote working at GitLab [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/).

Here's the list of our blog posts I would recommend. This may be a really interesting read for you:

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/18/the-case-for-all- remote-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/18/the-case-for-all-remote- companies/)

[2] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/17/eliminating- distractions...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/17/eliminating-distractions- and-getting-things-done/)

[3] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/27/remote-future-how- remote...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/27/remote-future-how-remote- companies-stay-connected/)

[4] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/17/remote-work- facilitates-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/17/remote-work-facilitates- devops/)

[5] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/16/remote-work-done- right/](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/16/remote-work-done-right/)

<comment><USER41> Thanks for sharing this. A quick suggestion though: you might want to limit the number of links you share in a single comment, as these 2+5 seem a bit too much for me, and they might look like you're trying to publicize your company a tad too much.

Or, from a slightly different perspective, they might look like you're trying to say as much as possible about the company you work for, instead of focusing on providing value to your readers.

To be clear, this just as a simple suggestion, based on the perception I had from your comment and from my personal experience (former tech evangelist at Amazon for 6 years, trying to give you my 0.02 to make you succeed in one of the hardest jobs in the world - I've been in these shoes :D)

<comment><USER42> While I agree with the suggestion, the way you tried so hard to be non- confrontational about it made it a little bit nauseating :P

<comment><USER41> You know? You are actually right. And your suggestion to me is very valuable. Thanks for sharing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Submarine piece? Lots of successful startups grow into large companies or exit without being remote, and remote startups fail just as easily. GitLab's success is arguably because of developer disenchantment with Github, as well as Gitlab giving more away for free than Github (VCS, CICD pipeline, etc), regardless of employee location arrangement.

Also, what is "success"? Taking $150MM (EDIT: corrected) in investment and not showing profitability [1]? I am not against the startup underdog story (a rising tide lifts all boats). I am against marketing fluff.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17224425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17224425)

<comment><USER44> > Also, what is "success"? Taking $350MM in investment and not showing > profitability

That's an odd thing to say. Most companies that take investment aren't profitable- that's kind of the point of taking VC: you want the cash in order to greatly grow the business more than if you were sitting within profitability the entire time. There's a difference between "unprofitable" and "choosing not to be profitable".

What's more, GitHub wasn't profitable the last ~5 years or so, from the day they took VC. But they sold for $7.5B, so it doesn't seem that Microsoft has a problem with their "unprofitability". That's how many solid, foundational companies are created.

<comment><USER43> Taking investment is not success though. Maybe one day Gitlab will exit (most likely outcome). Maybe one day they'll be profitable. Those days are not here, and that would be success. That has not occurred yet.

<comment><USER45> Also, their business model is "GitHub, but cheaper".

We now know what GitHub was worth, and it puts the lie to inflated valuations in this space. When $8Bn is a huge deal for your industry, it gets hard to sell higher valuations with a straight face.

<comment><USER46> I'm curious how you came to this conclusion about GitLab's business model? GitLab is pretty clear on the homepage. The business model is to compete in 9 different categories, only one of which is GitHub. (GitLab pricing is also higher than GitHub which makes sense when the offering provides more the functionality.)

<comment><USER45> Gitlab is absolutely _not_ higher than GitHub, unless you ignore all of the people who are running self-hosted Gitlab for free.

GitHub makes most of its revenue from the self-hosted market. GitLab is burning this market to the ground.

<comment><USER46> GH Enterprise pricing is $21 /user/mo [1]

GL Ultimate pricing is $99 /user/mo [2]

[1] [https://github.com/pricing/enterprise](https://github.com/pricing/enterprise) [2] [https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self- managed](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Last year i switched from totally remote to totally in-office. (From law to defense.) Now I cannot even access my work email from home. It is great. Bosses never expect an email to be answered immediatly. Sometimes i have shifts where i must man a paticular desk for certain hours, but mostly i set my own schedule. We have a gym, including a pool, in the office that we are expected to use on company time. Even going to the dentist is on company time. It is a unique office culture that i never expected. Until i got here i had no idea how unhappy i was while working remote.

<comment><USER46> > Bosses never expect an email to be answered immediately.

Sounds like wherever you were working before was doing it wrong.

I work remote and no one ever expects immediate email or slack. It is because the whole company is remote that this is the case - you can't have this type of expectation when folks are in every time zone across the globe.

Although I love remote, it's not for everyone. There's a lot to be said for perks like gym, dental, etc. It's really nice that you found a good fit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> How is tax on salaries handled in a situation like this? Seems like it would be really complicated.

<comment><USER49> For a few countries (The Netherlands and The United States for example) we have official entities that employ people. I for example am employed by the Dutch entity, meaning my salary and taxes are handled like any other Dutch employer.

Outside of these countries we employ employees as contractors, meaning they have to do the taxes and such themselves if I'm not mistaken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> 10.5 million in revenue with 350 employees? Anyone see a problem?

<comment><USER51> I responded to the other thread about this in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Juxtapose this story with Amazon "charging" their HQ2 hosts $48k per employee [0] in tax credits. For being such an efficient company on the surface, they sure have a long way to go in finding efficient ways to expand work environments. GitLab might be on to something.

[0] [http://www.fox5ny.com/news/48k-per-amazon-hq- job](http://www.fox5ny.com/news/48k-per-amazon-hq-job)

</comment><comment><USER53> Is $10M supposed to be impressive or something? They have 350 employees. The article is good but I don't understand why the title is written like that.

</comment><comment><USER54> Good for adopting the culture of remote working and making it work. But not sure what they'll do if I joined them while living in a big tech hub and then move to smaller cities. Are they going to enforce a pay cut? But nothing has changed, I was remote then, and I am remote now.

It should be based on the value that the talent brings.

<comment><USER55> Their employee handbook is clear on that: you need to inform them and they'll offer a you a new contract at the reduced rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I imagine a huge benefit not covered in the article is fewer HR issues. I work at a growing software house and there are lots of guys who simply have no clue how to interact with women in a healthy manner.

</comment><comment><USER57> I lived in an area where a lot of people were contracted to work for the US Army in their bases in Afganistan, Iraq, etc. for support roles (kitchen work, IT maintenance etc) with 6 months deployment, then a month free and 6 months again.

It was kind of a work that attracted many people from many different nationalities and their pay level was adjusted by average income in their home countries. So their expenses during the deployment were the same but the amount they would bring home was as much as 3x different for the same role.

</comment><comment><USER58> Were the original 9 remote as well? Looks like the _original two_ were remote - I just wonder what the composition looked like when they "hit it big".

<comment><USER49> If my memory serves me right, yes. Some of the early employees did work/live together for 2-3 months during Y Combinator if I remember correctly, but apart from that everybody has always been remote.

Source: early-ish/current employee (#28 I believe, not exactly prestigious).

<comment><USER58> So my follow up was/is - is this remote setup in fact their "secret sauce"? Seems like being a part of Y Combinator did more for their initial success.

<comment><USER49> I think there is no single "secret sauce", instead it is a combination of many different things. This includes being all remote, because it does drastically affect how a company operates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Is there no HQ at all? Even for the executive team?

<comment> boleary-gl There is no headquarters, even the executive team is remote. Many of them live in the Bay Area (where Sid, our CEO moved) but our VP of Product, for instance, is in Portugal.

IThere is a boardroom dedicated to GitLab where board meetings happen. But even for each of those, there is a zoom bridge for remote executives to join: [https://about.gitlab.com/company/visiting/](https://about.gitlab.com/company/visiting/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> At an average cost of $150k fully-loaded (rough guess), they're losing ~$40m / year. Not sure that warrants a victory lap.

</comment><comment><USER61> Nice headline but don't run to your VC just yet....

$10.5 MM revenue split 350 ways is $30,000 per employee.

I mean, nice to have revenue and growth but we're a way from being able to trumpet that from the roof-top yet. That EVA is roughly in line with many small service business which don't require $100MM infusion of venture capital....

<comment><USER62> Their actual current revenue numbers are a multiple of the $10.5M stated here.

The $10.5M is just the last known publicly known number.

An employee clarified here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014)

<comment><USER63> That employee is the CEO :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> "Today, GitLab's 350 employees across 45 countries use video calls and Slack chats to stay constantly connected."

Interesting that they don't use Gitter for chat. Perhaps they will be transitioning towards using it? GitLab acquired Gitter in March 2017; perhaps the article didn't get this detail correct...

<comment><USER65> They integrate Mattermost into the Omnibus....

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> What's interesting in this piece for me is not the remote working but that they raised $145.5M and generate $10.5M

<comment><USER67> My thoughts exactly. I can't believe they're bragging about it…

<comment><USER68> IIRC their revenue last year was 6 figures. That's very impressive growth for a somewhat crowded space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'm a big fan of remote working and I like github but it needs to be clarified, its "every employee working from home" and not 10.5M per employee.

Dang can you have a better headline- "gitlab made 10.5M by being 100% remote- only"

</comment><comment><USER70> So, one could rent a mailbox and VNC, maybe even a sleeping pod, in the most expensive neighbourhood in the world and then use the pay boost to live like a king somewhere really cheap.

Do they visit addresses to make sure you live there permanently?

<comment><USER71> You think your coworkers who actually live in that city and have real expenses wouldn't rat you out the instant you slip up and they find out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I was initially reading this as "GitLab Made $10.5M in Revenue _for_ Every Employee Working from Home". Now that would truly be a remarkable number as most major tech companies are <$2M/employee.

</comment><comment><USER73> One thing I don't like about Gitlab is their salary formula. They dock you in pay if you are in a lower cost of living area.

First, I think I should be paid based on the value I bring to a company, not my location. Otherwise, aren't we subsidizing those who choose to live in an expensive place like SF or NYC over those who are happy with a smaller city like Portland of Austin?

Second, while many cities have growing tech scenes, SF and Seattle remain fairly unique job markets. If you're outside those cities, you may have less expenses, but you also lose out on networking and may find it harder to find your next job (if for no other reason than the fact nonremote companies will shy away from relocating you if another qualified candidate is local).

<comment><USER51> Our reasons for paying local rates can be found on [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people- operations/global-c...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people- operations/global-compensation/#paying-local-rates)

Paying the same wage in different regions would lead to:

1\. A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.

2\. Team members in high-wage regions having less discretionary income than ones in low-wage countries with the same role.

3\. Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and unlikely to leave even when they are unhappy.

4\. If we start paying everyone the highest wage our compensation costs would increase greatly, we can hire fewer people, and we would get less results.

5\. If we start paying everyone the lowest wage we would not be able to attract and retain people in high-wage regions.

<comment><USER74> Number 3 is pretty rediculous. I don't think I've ever seen another company try to claim that they are doing employees a favor by paying them less money than their peers.

<comment><USER75> The issue with number 3 is for the employer, not the employee. GitLab doesn't want demotivated/unhappy employees to stick around: they want them to actively look for other opportunities and leave. Sounds reasonable to me.

<comment><USER73> >The issue with number 3 is for the employer, not the employee. GitLab doesn't want demotivated/unhappy employees to stick around: they want them to actively look for other opportunities and leave. Sounds reasonable to me.

Ironically if you paid a high salary but allowed people to work in a low COL area, this wouldn't be an issue... because the workers could aggressively save for retirement and semi-retire fairly early in their career.

<comment><USER76> But you want unhappy employee to leave in 2-3 months or ASAP not sticking for couple of years to earn his FIRE. I would say after 6 months you get to know quirks of company up to that you might still be oblivious to bodies in wardrobe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Promising "200% developer speed" is basically meaningless

</comment><comment><USER78> I believe in remote work but these numbers are terrible.

</comment><comment><USER79> I know so many beautiful remote places in Himalayas - ideal for remote working...

But there is almost zero demand for subcontracting or plain coding into a remote repository.

</comment><comment><USER80> It's worth pointing out that Gitlab's hosted service has suffered a myriad of pretty disastrous outages and problems over the past 12 months. In my experience, it's been totally unreliable compared to it's rivals. So I wouldn't say that they are a leading example of success just yet, although they certainly have a good shot.

<comment><USER24> Well, historically speaking and also likely true today, GitLab has made most of its customers by virtue of being the 'enterprise' solution. It existed before GitHub Enterprise, and was a good way to have Git hosting behind the firewall.

GitLab's hosted service, on the other hand, has traditionally been free and best-effort. That and they're moving hosting providers, which is definitely a non-trivial migration.

It's definitely fair to complain if you paid for the hosted version, but I think GitLab was plenty successful without monetizing GitLab.com.

<comment><USER65> The paid for hosted version is AFAICT difficult to run reliably as well - especially the CI runners.

GitLab prioritize breadth over depth - i.e. new features over bug fixes.

As far as I can tell, their regression testing is sub-optimal. Expanding a diff on a code review was broken in two releases.

<comment><USER24> I administrated an instance of GitLab EE for around a year solo for my previous employer. It was absolutely painless. The biggest issue I recall hitting was when I upgraded my LetsEncrypt setup broke, because they added LetsEncrypt setup to the core. The bug that caused it was fixed a couple days later anyways, though.

We used GitLab CI very heavily. The only issue we hit was disk space on workers filling up - but it was easy to resolve this by making a Cron job run `docker system prune`.

Generally, the GitLab team definitely has moved very quickly on new features and that has caused things to break here and there. I also agree they could use better regression testing. Still, they are very responsive to issue reports and most of the time issues that I care about are resolved very quickly.

GitHub as a competitor obviously is a lot more stable. But, I was definitely willing to trade some stability for the features GitLab offered, and I do feel they have been steadily improving in the past year.</comment></comment></comment></comment>