According to Yahoo Finance, Microsoft has 61,000 employees. Yahoo is a lot leaner–they have only 9,800. Google is a relative pipsqueak at 5,680 (though I hear they are now hiring at a clip of ~1,000/month). Sometimes size has its advantages, but it’s amazing how much a small team can accomplish with energy, smarts, and freely available infrastructure and tools.
Example #1: about a year ago, Jay Barnson decided to build a working role-playing game from scratch, by himself, in a week (defined as a 40 hour working period)–with no budget. Actually, he did it on a bet, and one of the parameters was that Jay couldn’t use existing game engines (doing so would have made the task easier; instead, he used basic code libraries and other free tools like MS Paint). Here’s the end product. While it won’t break your Guild Wars addiction, it’s still pretty interesting.
Other one-person projects have gone on to bigger success. Take Joshua Schachter, who initially built Del.icio.us while he had an unrelated, full time job (in an early interview, when asked how he could afford to eat, he replied: “I have a day job. I only work on del.icio.us one evenings and weekends. It’s not that expensive, just rack space and ALL MY SPARE TIME”). As everyone knows, Joshua later quit his old job, hired a few people, raised capital, and eventually sold to Yahoo.
My latest favorite one person show is plentyoffish.com, which is a dating site. The service is very similar to other established competitors–except it’s completely free to use (other sites, like Match, charge a monthly fee). The site’s sole owner and employee claims to generate ~$10,000/day from contextual ads. While I can’t confirm that number, the site’s traffic stats look impressive:
Looks like plentyoffish.com has about 1/6th of the traffic that Match.com has.
What are you working on?
Notice the peak in traffic, when the fish-guy “revealed” his earnings. One of the best / most effective viral marketing ideas I have seen so far
Left by Sinnfrei on April 10th, 2006