Which companies work like Gumroad?

Thanks for asking this.

I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.

My company is ran similarly; though I never raised VC and bootstrapped my way to profitability over 5 years as a solo founder. I provide a simple platform for people to play their friends on high quality CS:GO servers, while keeping track of their stats/wins/losses. https://popflash.site

If you have played a lot of Counterstrike, have real-world technical skills, and are interested in a flexible autonomous environment much like Gumroad, feel free to tell me about your recent projects: daniel@popflash.site

Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point.

Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in public repos. Slack and Zoom are used, but if they're used to make decisions, the recording is saved for others to consume and the decision is documented on GitHub.

Meetings are discouraged, but not non-existent. To give some context, I'm a manager of two teams and this week I had 4.5 hours of meetings (including 1:1s), which is pretty normal. When I was an independent contributor on a single team, I often had weeks where I had a single 30 minute meeting.

In practice today, I suspect an engineer at Elastic will spend an average of ~2 hours a week in a meeting, with a few spending a great deal more than that and others spending less.

This culture is demonstrated top-down and has been a common thread from the early days, through the IPO, and continues today.

Edit: We also have a general philosophy of features being done when they're done rather than when we reach some arbitrary date. This doesn't mean we don't have timelines (we have ~2 month long release cycles), but if we can pair down scope to make a release, we will, and if we can't do it then we'll just move the feature to the next release instead.

We've codified a lot of the philosophy that feeds into this workflow here: https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code

My startup, Haekka (https://haekka.com) functions similarly. We don’t deal with office politics and bullshit. We only have two FTEs (founders) and 3 contractors. We’re 100% remote and have no plans on not being remote. My previous company that I sold was remote for 7 years. I don’t believe in building software in an office.

We’re very transparent about our financial and business goals. My only scheduled meeting is a weekly dev sync that I do think is very helpful, but we don’t do daily standups or daily calls. All comms are done through Slack, GitHub PR comments and Linear comments.

I will likely be hiring a contract python (or full stack) dev in Q1 as well as a growth marketing position. Feel free to email me ryan@haekka.com

I run a small B2B service/product hybrid company, DevisedLabs, focused on ecommerce in a somewhat similar fashion. Our team of 12 is entirely freelancers, from engineering, to project management, to sales. We only hold meetings when necessary (we have no standups) and meetings are generally <= 2 people since it's usually for a specific purpose. We coordinate mostly over Trello and Slack, and meetings are reserved for demos or complicated questions. We use OneNote and Notion for company-wide knowledge, planning, and information tracking.

Since everyone is freelancers, most work for other clients or have regular full-time jobs. Everyone has flexibility on hours, but we try to pick those who have overlap with the team, especially for those who need to interface with our clients. Some in our team prefer to travel around, others stay fixed in a location.

Rates-wise, we don't prescribe a formula for what others should charge, nor do we usually try to negotiate anyone down. I believe everyone should make the decision of what their time is worth themselves. That is one of the biggest benefits of self-employment after all. Ultimately it comes down to what that time translates into value, so that's the lens we view it through.

I would say it's worked well for us, although I do see the value in employment for our most dedicated team members. Those who are truly full-time should be given full-time employment I believe, since it better protects them (benefits, unemployment, etc). Others who want to have a freelance life should be allowed to do that too. We will likely be offering both options eventually.

I've just launched a site which has a goal to collect different companies that support Gumroad's model - https://creatorjobs.co/

If anyone knows about this type of company, please contact me at contact@creatorjobs.co.

I run my company in a similar way. It's myself, three employees and a bunch of contractors. ( https://asylumsquare.com/team )

We have an office, but everyone can work from where-ever he wants to (actually the freelancers are from all around the world). Since Covid hit we're operating 100% remote before most of the time we worked with 2 people in the office the rest of us remotely.

Everyone works as much or less as he wants, can take days off whenever he feels like.

We do have voice calls from time to time when it's appropriate, but in 99.9% only two people are involved and it usually happens when we have the feeling it would clarify faster as by asynchronous chat (for example when screen share is involved to demonstrate something). Actually I wouldn't even call it meetings because we mostly don't even setup a schedule, it just naturally happens (for example chatting about a specific topic, then deciding a call would be easier / faster).

It works well for us, but I think it would be a lot harder if we were more people as we don't have anyone who organizes or manages the project and the people.

I interviewed at a company under Hall Labs (https://halllabs.com/). All hourly paid employees with no benefits. Not certain about their management or meeting handling though.

I had the same question in mind when reading the other HN thread. I recently started doing contracting work and would like to try working with such a team.

Just thinking out loud here, but that may be a good target for a niche job board? That’s maybe already a thing.

Userify (https://userify.com) is similar; meetings are rare (except probably with customers). Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with a strong bias toward the minimum number of team members for any project.

Most team members are contractors, even those working on new top-secret products, which might be because the core team is small and based in Texas and most devs are geographically elsewhere. It does seem to take up some time to build trust on new commits, which is a bit discouraging at first, but reviews are usually within 24 hours. Pay is based on deliverables, not hourly or salaried, so you don't get paid for time spent learning or experimenting, but free training and classes.

The core team seems a bit old school and conservative in tech choices (not much in the way of k8s, for example), and there's not much in the way of "team" tools like you might expect for a geographically distributed team, which seems to slow things down a bit and reduce communication velocity, but they're very responsive (this might be because it's a smaller, security-focused company). Also a rather complex 10-page NDA.

Chipping in as the co-founder of a job board startup - https://swissdevjobs.ch

We are:

- 2 co-founders

- 2 up to 4 people part-time as contractors

- full remote, almost zero offline retreats

- growing the user base around 10% MoM

- all communication happens on our Discord server

- bootstrapped, no founding

It's not clear if this model will scale easily, but I can see us growing to at least 10-15 people this way.

Speaking of long shots, I'm looking for exactly this setup with a Clojure(script) stack.

The alternative is to build what you want, that has been my current plan. My only problem is that I want to make everything open source, and have no idea how to monetize my work.

I read the post as a Transloadit.com founder and found it to 90% overlap. We do have a team meetup once a year and Friday remote gaming sessions, and one fulltimer tho (out of 18)

Doist (http://doist.com) works similarly.

See https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/what-remote-work-looks-like... (paywalled) for a good description of it.

You'd want to survey companies that investors like https://indie.vc, https://earnestcapital.com, and https://tinyseed.com invest in.

At what revenue would it start calling a full company rather than just a side-project?

It's a little different for Gumroad because they started as a company with an office and became this, but for many side projects, they start out without meetings, without offices and remain that way earning a couple of thousand USD per month.

Not the same but a weird one is Gore. They’ve a flat structure and no managers.

Just made a tiny job board for this: unaffixed.com

Send new jobs to: jobs@unaffixed.com

Craigslist has (had?) no deadlines and no (formal) meetings.

comma.ai, a profitable AI startup that has an open source autonomous driver assistance system, called openpilot, a bit like Tesla Autopilot.

they previously raised money, and is now recently profitable.

very rare in this space.

We do! (and are hiring; although we are tiny!) https://datascienceretreat.com/

You'll have to be specific. Work in what way?

Valve perhaps?

37signals probably.