In my previous post, I had said you are not a company. The issue was simple - if the business falls apart without you (ie single-employee situations), then that isn’t a company. It is more freelancing.

The same should apply to ‘companies’ that rely purely on widgets.

I read today on TechCrunch on how JS-Kit just secured $1.2 million. It boggled my mind when you look at their stats:

  • 1 CEO
  • 12 engineers (what in God’s name!)
  • 5,000 sites using their widgets
  • 1,000 adding each month (but no mention of how many stop using - unless 1000 is net)

First off - what does JS-Kit do that requires 12 employees? I’ve talked about Blog Flux scaling issues, and we were able to solve that with a rotating 1.5 man programming team. Back then we were doing 20 million Apache requests a day - that number is far higher.

But even more depressing is 5,000 users. That is absolutely horrible. Hell iBegin Weather has over two thousand sites using the widget and it was just launched on May 10 (< 3 months).

So really - 5,000 sites isn't impressive. 1,000 a month isn't impressive. 12 engineers begs the question - "wtf are they doing?"

At the end of the day, it is the entire business case that blows my mind. $40 a month. How many people do they honestly believe are going to pay $40 a month? Even with 1,000 paying customers, that means $40,000 in revenue. Is that suppoused to pay for 13 employees? And dropping ads into the widget? Sure you may make some money, but expect a lot of users to drop you like a hot potato - most serious professionals (which is who they want) would rather take the time to find a new widget/install a new widget than to have ads cropping up into a simple rating widget.

And this 5,000 is with TechCrunch having mentioned them before - imagine if they had gone TC-less.