How many staff members to start off with?

[cpvr]

How many staff members do you think a virtual pet site needs to start off with in order to become a successful one? Well, having a lot of staff members doesn't mean anything. You need a lot of hard-working staff members who are willing to put the time in to help your virtual pet site become one of the greatest. Just take a look at Marapets - most of the programming is done by Ian and the art is done by Laimay while the community is ran by its administrators and moderators.

So, how many staff members do you think a pet site needs to start off with? A few artists? What about a few programmers? What are your thoughts on this issue?

[GodsGal]

I don't think you need a lot of staff until the site gets bigger. I mean, once the site's mainly working, as long as you have at least one programmer and an artist or two things should be fine. But that's just my opinion.

[Ole]

You need a partner for sure. If you have no one to talk to, no one to collaborate ideas with...then site development gets boring and you have no actual input from someone else.

2-3 would be good, to start with. I believe the owner should be either a) Rich, b) programmer :) Once there's a foundation of code and an actual site, you can look for artists/mods etc and show them your site as an example of what they can expect to be working on/with.

[Vivacity]

Daxitove started with 3, and now we're around 8 active workers. You need at least one person to bounce ideas off of when planning, and then you need just a handful (5 or so) of active people to start physical work.

[recreations]

You probably need some 1-2 programmers along with yourself and a handful of artists and admin and that's enough and you can always have more, but that's after the trial period when your site does good and grows.

[SilveradoHD]

Im not starting a pet site, but I thought I would weigh in.

Currently there is Myself, 1 programmer, 2 Regular Staff, 3 Moderators, 1 artist. This may seem like a lot to start off with, but I want a good deal of people with background knowledge on the site and we all collaborate with ideas.

[gscs]

Basically, a company should have a director, a admistrator, one or two sales-person, or another general worker. Ha! that's my company.

For this virtual pet site business, i think should have a head, a programmer, a graphic design, a moderator or a staff. I mean at the beginning. When the company start growing, you will have to hire more manpower to cover your job load. Alternately, you can look for outsourcing. This is a good way to save cost and let the expert to haddle what's your weaknesses.

[Neoixan]

like neopets, they started with 2 people, then got shut down because of money, until this other person came in to help, started with 3 people, source: wikipedia.

[Russell]

I think a good # would be atleast 4-5. 1 owner, 1 co owner, 1 artist, 1 programmer, 1 mod