alt Hacker NewsThis is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire.
Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny portion of the picture, and says nothing about the health of a business.
If you’re looking to ‘be open’ about the health of your business, then the operating costs would be shared, the amount the founders are ‘taking out’ of the business in dividends would be shared.
There are businesses that operate 20MM a year in revenue, but practically speaking are broke, because of the way the business is being run.
So for folks that don’t know better, this is a very cool thing ente is doing. For folks that run businesses and know better, this is a way to show off and ‘gain cred’ without actually having to be open about how the business operates.
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I once worked for a company where they operated in the red for 95% of the year as they paid for project material costs up front. The CFO was quite open about how finances worked in our niche sector.
A client would pay an invoice and the balance would swing from -£20M to £0 and back down to -£15M for the next project within weeks! Revenue was in the £100Ms per annum.
As someone with almost zero business background it was a real eye opener how much we depended on a healthy relationship with the local bank manager. The business model clearly worked as they passed their 30th anniversary during my employment!
What's wrong with that? This is a post to show users that other people are paying for it (social proof) and that the project is developing well, similar to other projects sharing how many contributions or first time pull requests they got this month. That doesn't mean that you have to show everyones salary, how much the lunch in the office is costing and include a raw export of their bookkeeping setup.
There's room for both.
> Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit.
This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.
What an unnecessarily negative and cynical reaction to what is neutral at worst and positive at best
They poster goes into more details here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905
But also, this is not a very constructive comment. They're pushing a new product that based on the upvotes this community is interested it.
All you saw on that page was the revenue?
For a potential customer deciding whether to trust a relatively small app (compared to Google and Apple) with their memories, these are useful numbers. 50% increase in paying customers this year. Nearly half a million registered users, with a 40% growth in the last 6 months. 5% of their users are paying customers. Revenue topping a million. That's stuff I want to know if I'm subscribing and uploading all my pics to their servers. I want to know if they'll be around, and my stuff is safe.
> So for folks that don’t know better, this is a very cool thing ente is doing. For folks that run businesses and know better...
Oh please. Perhaps work on not jumping to conclusions too quickly.
> "Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny portion of the picture"
Showing revenue is not "tiny" by any means. Considering that the vast majority of businesses hide this from the public, I think it's very notably "something larger than tiny".
> "but practically speaking [they] are broke"
How do you know this?