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> hundreds of thousands and it can't be sustainable? How many users do they think they need to make it sustainable? What were the targets?

If you assume 80% of users were 'free' and 20% were paid (which is probably pretty generous), and 'hundreds of thousands' means 200-400k users, annual revenue was maybe $5m - $10m.

There are 74 employees who have listed Neeva as their employer on linkedin, so even assuming that is all staff and that the average salary is $50k-£100k (which seems low?), salary then is somewhere between $3.7 - $7.4m.

So I can absolutely see a world where they were losing a lot of money - if they paid staff $100k and had c300k users of which 20% were paid, they can't even cover staff costs before even considering hosting/user aquisition costs/office space/equipment/software licences etc.



Premature scaling, then.




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