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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

This looks great for medium-large size teams, but I've often found these sorts of tools to not have the same impact in smaller teams where communication and processes are a bit leaner and requirements simpler. Is this a market you're aiming for, and how do you think Runway suits small teams?

Related, I often find pricing doesn't scale down well for smaller teams (for understandable reasons!). What sort of ballpark are you thinking about?

Lastly, are you tackling the case of agency model development with external clients who may be involved in QA or other steps in the process? I see this as a common model in iOS.

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Fwiw we're on the smaller side (~17 people, 3 mobile eng) and have been loving Runway for months. I definitely expect the impact will scale with our team size, but it's already been a no-brainer win for us.

When we started, we had a 100% founder-led development/releases process, and the Runway team was pretty hands on in helping us level up. Spending less founder time/thought on releases has been extremely high leverage.

Two other top of mind benefits so far have been a) increased visibility with our ops team (we're very ops/field heavy), and b) improved QA consistency with the release checklist feature.

You're definitely right, in its current form Runway is aimed most squarely at mid to large sized teams. But, we do think there's still value for smaller teams - and in fact, a couple of our early customers are on the smaller side. Although some of the coordination and process overhead isn't there, there's still value in creating a source of truth and reducing context-switching between tools during releases. And, it's really valuable to get a framework like Runway in place earlier on, to better position a team for growth! We envision helping small teams out early on in a lighter-touch way and then helping them mature.

At the moment our main tier is $400/mo, but we're exploring other options for those teams that are smaller and/or at earlier stages.

Re: external clients - This is a really interesting use case that we've chatted to some agencies about. The way we've been thinking about users and roles, it would make a lot of sense to give scoped access to clients and allow them to participate in specific areas as needed!

+1 to the external clients. Not sure if it makes sense for it to be agency driven with external client stakeholders, or company driven with external agency developers/PMs. I'd imagine the former would be more common but could be quite a different solution for the latter.

At the moment, $400/mo is more than the savings calculator suggests we can save, but we're currently 1 full time, 1 part time iOS engineer, 1 release a month, 2 apps (same codebase, whitelabelled). I think $400/mo for ~10 devs makes sense, at that scale it's similar in cost to our other collaboration and CI tools, but I suspect we'd have a hard time justifying it until we're at that sort of scale.

Are there costly features you can cut that could make it, say, $100 for < 5 people perhaps? Something that opens it up to small teams who can then "grow up" on the platform?

Based on what we've heard from agencies, it seems it could be driven from either side: sometimes the agency handles the tooling and that's actually some of their value-add (having everything in place already), sometimes it's all BYO tools on the part of the company/client. Anecdotally, the former seems more common, like you say.

We hear you on the math! Our pricing is a work in progress and there's more we'll do on the lower end of the scale for sure. We're hesitant to cut/bundle the product too much but it's a likely option.

If you and your team are interested in trying us out, let's definitely chat though!

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