9 ms·

Ask HN: Single-person company exit

163 points by michaeloblak 10y ago

Can anyone share an experience from selling a self-founded, single-person company? Topic is created because of a comment in this[1] thread [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065355

dhruvkar 10y ago
hey michael, OP of the referenced post. Heavy user of gdrive here, hope you're not looking to sell sheetsu just yet, we have some use cases coming for it in the next few months. :)
- michaeloblak 10y ago
  No, I'm not planning to sell https://sheetsu.com https://sheetsu.com, no worries. It's not worth that much yet. I'm just curious if solopreneurs are selling their companies and if yes, how did they do it. Or if they keep it and profit. P.S. I'm eager to talk about your use cases for the coming months. You can find my email on the website mentioned above.
  - british_india 10y ago
    Single guy developed OkCupid without VC money. Sold it for millions
  - dhruvkar 10y ago
    Sync source for alglolia. I'll send you an email as well with details. Perhaps you can guide me as to whether sheetsu would be good for this.
  - beamatronic 10y ago
    Sheetsu looks amazing! This looks like the Parse replacement everyone has been looking for. I built my own version of this, API for a Google Sheet, but it never occurred to me that anyone else would want it!
    - michaeloblak 10y ago
      Thanks. It never occurred to me that it might be a Parse replacement. I need to improve it a little bit and it might do the job.
  - dev1n 10y ago
    Okay so if you didn't post this I would never have known about sheetsu. Great project! I wish HN would do one day out of the month where commenters could post their "Show HN" that they released that month. Much like the Who's Hiring threads. It would help me find some awesome software that didn't quite make it to the front page.
    - exolymph 10y ago
      Might be worth emailing dang about this idea. Or organizing it informally.
      - dev1n 10y ago
        I just emailed dang. Let's see what happens!
        squeaky-clean 10y ago
        I like the idea a lot. There's plenty of things I've done that I'd like to share, but don't feel they're noteworthy enough for a whole Show HN, yet my friends aren't geeky enough to appreciate. The same idea for "Ask HN" would be neat too. A lot of subreddits have a weekly or monthly "Simple Questions" thread which are really helpful.
    - marktangotango 10y ago
      Similarly, I created www.lite-engine.com for people who want to trivially post data to an SQLite database. I've not attracted much notice yet. I certainly appreciate any feedback on the concept!
      - hluska 10y ago
        Good job launching (and good on you for finding a good chance to drop the link!). :) I don't have much use for it now, but I have worked in marketing heavy organizations in the past where I would have loved to have something like this. If I could give you some advice though, it would be to really carefully figure out who you are selling this to and then target your website to that person. Right now, it seems to be mostly targeted to me. That's great, but to be honest, it's pretty trivial for me to set up my own database. And, when I set up my own, I don't have to worry about things like your backup policy, your privacy policy, where you and your servers are located, etc. I think that you'd have more luck if you targeted it to marketing types. You get close to that in your blog (posting an HTML form with Captcha), but I'd love to see your conversions if you targeted the whole thing to non-technical marketers who work in technical fields.
jewel 10y ago
You'll be interested in patio11's experience selling bingo-card creator, which more-or-less meets your criteria of a self-founded, single-person company: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_software_business https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...
lucasgonze 10y ago
I have. DM/email me (lucas@gonze.com) if you want to chat. My company was Webjay, a playlist-sharing site. No funding, no other devs. 500K users, 10 million page views / month. Selling was dramatically easier than ordinary because I was getting the whole pie, not a slice, and because I had no investors to placate. I did not get FU rich, and I still have to work, but my quality of life was dramatically improved for the rest of my life. The hardest deal term in the acquisition was indemnification. I refused to indemnify the acquirer, they insisted on it. Finally I said: 1. If we don't have enough personal trust in this relationship for you to believe in my company's practices, you shouldn't enter this deal at all. And if you do, indemnification doesn't matter. 2. You are a more attractive target than me. Many people would sue you who wouldn't bother with me. It was harder post-acquisition than ordinary, because I was a faction of one within the acquirer (yahoo).
- vram22 10y ago
  Interesting story. Indemnify for what?
  - lucasgonze 10y ago
    For copyright-related lawsuits, given that my site was music UGC.
    - Someone1234 10y ago
      Just curious, how many years did they want indemnification for? I cannot imagine it being an indefinite arrangement...
      - lucasgonze 10y ago
        Sorry, I don't remember.
- toyg 10y ago
  I was a total Webjay fanboi! I loved to let other people find new weird music for me... I remember you being pretty knowledgeable on the "scene" back then -- what would you recommend today to do what webjay used to? Spotify is very curated and doesn't feel spontaneous at all, whereas Youtube is an unbrowseable cauldron of shit.
krewast 10y ago
I found the story of Trevor McKendrick who sold his bible app company [0] pretty interesting. There is also an article about him and his startup on Business Insider [1]. [0] https://trevormckendrick.com/how-i-sold-my-bible-app-company-b984bdd1f57b https://trevormckendrick.com/how-i-sold-my-bible-app-company... [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/atheist-makes-100000-selling-bibles-2015-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/atheist-makes-100000-selling-...
stevesearer 10y ago
Been running https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com for 9 years and I haven't sold it or exited, though I have had various offers of varying seriousness throughout the years. At this point it would be hard for me to see myself selling because I really enjoy running the site. Plus it would feel strange to let someone else do whatever they want with the thing I've created and spent so much time on. Not saying I wouldn't sell, but I wonder if many other single-person companies are in the same boat and feel the same way. Would love to hear :)
- mandeepj 10y ago
  Wow! Your site has a great design
- Someone1234 10y ago
  That's a great site, I love the design and utility. I have a question: Where do the photos actually come from? Do you yourself run around taking pictures of people's offices? Or do you work with the designers to be featured on the site? How did you initially source your images, get the copyright to show them, in order to entice the designers to work with you?
  - stevesearer 10y ago
    I primarily work with the architects and designers to get the project imagery. Back in the day I would visit some offices and snap some photos, but they just didn't compare to professional quality images.
    - Someone1234 10y ago
      Interesting. Thanks for the answer. :)
hkmurakami 10y ago
Marco Armwnt selling Instapaper is fairly well documented.
- idlewords 10y ago
  He went on to buy a vowel.
xur17 10y ago
I have. Happy to discuss if you want to shoot me an email (in profile).
cl42 10y ago
Not quite a single-person exit but I think Plenty of Fish [1] is a great story -- one guy builds dating site, bootstraps to 75 people, sells for $575M with 100% ownership. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped-plentyoffish-and-sold-it-for-575-million-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped...
- blahi 10y ago
  I remember how this guy came to a forum and asked whether starting a dating site would be a good idea. Everybody said "no".
  - cl42 10y ago
    lol, that's amazing if true.
  - mmishu 10y ago
    I dont doubt you, but source?
    - blahi 10y ago
      Damn, I can't find the thread. His handle is MarcusPOF but the thread was started on another account (obviously). The forum was wickedfire. There are other regulars lurking on HN. Somebody else might chime in. The forum is dead now and has been for many years. But it had its day. The guy who made and sold Indeed was a regular too as well as other pretty successful people, but it had a ... let's call it a certain vibe.
      - joshmn 10y ago
        Still some gems lingering around: https://www.google.com/search?aqs=chrome..69i57.1782j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=site:wickedfire.com+%22plentyoffish%22 https://www.google.com/search?aqs=chrome..69i57.1782j0j7&sou... From what I briefly gathered, WickedFire is similar to today's WarriorForum.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
thomasbachem 10y ago
I've built Germany's biggest online resume editor (https://lebenslauf.com https://lebenslauf.com), which started as a side project next to my main startup. Some years ago a friend asked me to help her out with her resume, how to convert it into a proper PDF file etc. – busy and short of time as I was, I simply looked for some online tool to point her to. Disappointed by the results of my search back then (2011) and motivated to fully design, code and market a small project on my own (after all those years mostly doing management), I started Lebenslauf.com and quickly got fascinated by the idea and technical challenges of a WYSIWYG CV editor. For quite some time, it remained a side project where I'd spend about 4 hours per week maximum. Meanwhile the number of users grew slowly but steadily thanks to word-of-mouth from my friends and their friends and their friends... After I sold my main startup in 2012, I finally found the time and fully realized the huge potential of Lebenslauf.com. So I started making it my main project in 2013 and at some point charged money for the created PDF files, which instantly led to five-figure revenues. About one year later (2014), I sold it to https://xing.com https://xing.com (public company, essentially the German LinkedIn) for a higher seven-digit figure. I managed to get competing bids for it from multiple companies, so the whole sale process is a story of its own. It's still astonishing to see what has grown out of it and how many people use it every day, and it was an exciting journey with totally different experiences than a venture-funded company.
- TheBiv 10y ago
  >> I managed to get competing bids for it from multiple companies, so the whole sale process is a story of its own. I am interested in hearing this story! :) Thank you for the original comment as well!
  - thomasbachem 10y ago
    Talks with other companies started when I planned to rent out white-labeled versions of the site to job portals etc., so they could have their very own branded CV editor and possibly get a revenue share. During a lunch with the CEO of a German job portal, where we were talking about a white label, he asked me whether it was possible for them to get access to the CV data of my existing users. I replied "You'd need to buy the site then" without actually thinking about it. He in return asked for a price and I came up with 400k euros just to double it in an email hours later ("after carefully calculating again..." ooops double the price :D). When he still was interested, it struck me that a sale might be worth pursuing. I then contacted his biggest German competitors to get counter offers, and they seemed pretty interested too. Funny anecdote: The CEO of one company told me that they're not actually interested at that price, but that I should tell the others they'd offer a million euros, just because he liked me and wanted his competitors to overpay. He even told me he would confirm that offer if they ask him. I didn't do it of course. In contrast to the others, XING offered me a deal with a lower upfront payment but a huge earnout upside. I spent quite a few months tracking, testing and analyzing my users' behavior in regard to the earnout KPIs, calculating whether the deal would be better for me and of course negotiating during that time to make it even better. That's essentially it, I tried to go into as many details as possible without getting into trouble :)
mbesto 10y ago
I've helped several buyers of 2-4 man companies (mainly SaaS). Feel free to reach out.
jkingsbery 10y ago
If you are interested in stories of that nature, http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ talks about the process of two guys who've done that before and are in the middle of doing it now. Rob Walling has a separate site, http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ http://www.softwarebyrob.com/, where he talks about the same sorts of things.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hoodoof 10y ago
The question is, if you have a company worth selling and you are a single owner and founder, is there any way to build the perception of high value, similar to the valuation perceptions created for venture backed startups?
- HappyTypist 10y ago
  Yes. Hire a PR company, pump out your metrics, and optimize for short term revenue / profit growth.
known 10y ago
A bank in Germany has just one employee http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-a-bank-in-germany-has-just-one-employee/20130215.htm http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-a-ban...

163 points by michaeloblak 10y ago

Can anyone share an experience from selling a self-founded, single-person company? Topic is created because of a comment in this[1] thread [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065355

dhruvkar 10y ago

hey michael, OP of the referenced post. Heavy user of gdrive here, hope you're not looking to sell sheetsu just yet, we have some use cases coming for it in the next few months. :)

michaeloblak 10y ago
No, I'm not planning to sell https://sheetsu.com https://sheetsu.com, no worries. It's not worth that much yet. I'm just curious if solopreneurs are selling their companies and if yes, how did they do it. Or if they keep it and profit. P.S. I'm eager to talk about your use cases for the coming months. You can find my email on the website mentioned above.
- british_india 10y ago
  Single guy developed OkCupid without VC money. Sold it for millions
- dhruvkar 10y ago
  Sync source for alglolia. I'll send you an email as well with details. Perhaps you can guide me as to whether sheetsu would be good for this.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  Sheetsu looks amazing! This looks like the Parse replacement everyone has been looking for. I built my own version of this, API for a Google Sheet, but it never occurred to me that anyone else would want it!
  - michaeloblak 10y ago
    Thanks. It never occurred to me that it might be a Parse replacement. I need to improve it a little bit and it might do the job.
- dev1n 10y ago
  Okay so if you didn't post this I would never have known about sheetsu. Great project! I wish HN would do one day out of the month where commenters could post their "Show HN" that they released that month. Much like the Who's Hiring threads. It would help me find some awesome software that didn't quite make it to the front page.
  - exolymph 10y ago
    Might be worth emailing dang about this idea. Or organizing it informally.
    - dev1n 10y ago
      I just emailed dang. Let's see what happens!
      - squeaky-clean 10y ago
        I like the idea a lot. There's plenty of things I've done that I'd like to share, but don't feel they're noteworthy enough for a whole Show HN, yet my friends aren't geeky enough to appreciate. The same idea for "Ask HN" would be neat too. A lot of subreddits have a weekly or monthly "Simple Questions" thread which are really helpful.
  - marktangotango 10y ago
    Similarly, I created www.lite-engine.com for people who want to trivially post data to an SQLite database. I've not attracted much notice yet. I certainly appreciate any feedback on the concept!
    - hluska 10y ago
      Good job launching (and good on you for finding a good chance to drop the link!). :) I don't have much use for it now, but I have worked in marketing heavy organizations in the past where I would have loved to have something like this. If I could give you some advice though, it would be to really carefully figure out who you are selling this to and then target your website to that person. Right now, it seems to be mostly targeted to me. That's great, but to be honest, it's pretty trivial for me to set up my own database. And, when I set up my own, I don't have to worry about things like your backup policy, your privacy policy, where you and your servers are located, etc. I think that you'd have more luck if you targeted it to marketing types. You get close to that in your blog (posting an HTML form with Captcha), but I'd love to see your conversions if you targeted the whole thing to non-technical marketers who work in technical fields.

jewel 10y ago

You'll be interested in patio11's experience selling bingo-card creator, which more-or-less meets your criteria of a self-founded, single-person company: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_software_business https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...

lucasgonze 10y ago

I have. DM/email me (lucas@gonze.com) if you want to chat. My company was Webjay, a playlist-sharing site. No funding, no other devs. 500K users, 10 million page views / month. Selling was dramatically easier than ordinary because I was getting the whole pie, not a slice, and because I had no investors to placate. I did not get FU rich, and I still have to work, but my quality of life was dramatically improved for the rest of my life. The hardest deal term in the acquisition was indemnification. I refused to indemnify the acquirer, they insisted on it. Finally I said: 1. If we don't have enough personal trust in this relationship for you to believe in my company's practices, you shouldn't enter this deal at all. And if you do, indemnification doesn't matter. 2. You are a more attractive target than me. Many people would sue you who wouldn't bother with me. It was harder post-acquisition than ordinary, because I was a faction of one within the acquirer (yahoo).

vram22 10y ago
Interesting story. Indemnify for what?
- lucasgonze 10y ago
  For copyright-related lawsuits, given that my site was music UGC.
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    Just curious, how many years did they want indemnification for? I cannot imagine it being an indefinite arrangement...
    - lucasgonze 10y ago
      Sorry, I don't remember.
toyg 10y ago
I was a total Webjay fanboi! I loved to let other people find new weird music for me... I remember you being pretty knowledgeable on the "scene" back then -- what would you recommend today to do what webjay used to? Spotify is very curated and doesn't feel spontaneous at all, whereas Youtube is an unbrowseable cauldron of shit.

krewast 10y ago

I found the story of Trevor McKendrick who sold his bible app company [0] pretty interesting. There is also an article about him and his startup on Business Insider [1]. [0] https://trevormckendrick.com/how-i-sold-my-bible-app-company-b984bdd1f57b https://trevormckendrick.com/how-i-sold-my-bible-app-company... [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/atheist-makes-100000-selling-bibles-2015-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/atheist-makes-100000-selling-...

stevesearer 10y ago

Been running https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com for 9 years and I haven't sold it or exited, though I have had various offers of varying seriousness throughout the years. At this point it would be hard for me to see myself selling because I really enjoy running the site. Plus it would feel strange to let someone else do whatever they want with the thing I've created and spent so much time on. Not saying I wouldn't sell, but I wonder if many other single-person companies are in the same boat and feel the same way. Would love to hear :)

mandeepj 10y ago
Wow! Your site has a great design
Someone1234 10y ago
That's a great site, I love the design and utility. I have a question: Where do the photos actually come from? Do you yourself run around taking pictures of people's offices? Or do you work with the designers to be featured on the site? How did you initially source your images, get the copyright to show them, in order to entice the designers to work with you?
- stevesearer 10y ago
  I primarily work with the architects and designers to get the project imagery. Back in the day I would visit some offices and snap some photos, but they just didn't compare to professional quality images.
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for the answer. :)

hkmurakami 10y ago

Marco Armwnt selling Instapaper is fairly well documented.

idlewords 10y ago
He went on to buy a vowel.

xur17 10y ago

I have. Happy to discuss if you want to shoot me an email (in profile).

cl42 10y ago

Not quite a single-person exit but I think Plenty of Fish [1] is a great story -- one guy builds dating site, bootstraps to 75 people, sells for $575M with 100% ownership. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped-plentyoffish-and-sold-it-for-575-million-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped...

blahi 10y ago
I remember how this guy came to a forum and asked whether starting a dating site would be a good idea. Everybody said "no".
- cl42 10y ago
  lol, that's amazing if true.
- mmishu 10y ago
  I dont doubt you, but source?
  - blahi 10y ago
    Damn, I can't find the thread. His handle is MarcusPOF but the thread was started on another account (obviously). The forum was wickedfire. There are other regulars lurking on HN. Somebody else might chime in. The forum is dead now and has been for many years. But it had its day. The guy who made and sold Indeed was a regular too as well as other pretty successful people, but it had a ... let's call it a certain vibe.
    - joshmn 10y ago
      Still some gems lingering around: https://www.google.com/search?aqs=chrome..69i57.1782j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=site:wickedfire.com+%22plentyoffish%22 https://www.google.com/search?aqs=chrome..69i57.1782j0j7&sou... From what I briefly gathered, WickedFire is similar to today's WarriorForum.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

thomasbachem 10y ago

I've built Germany's biggest online resume editor (https://lebenslauf.com https://lebenslauf.com), which started as a side project next to my main startup. Some years ago a friend asked me to help her out with her resume, how to convert it into a proper PDF file etc. – busy and short of time as I was, I simply looked for some online tool to point her to. Disappointed by the results of my search back then (2011) and motivated to fully design, code and market a small project on my own (after all those years mostly doing management), I started Lebenslauf.com and quickly got fascinated by the idea and technical challenges of a WYSIWYG CV editor. For quite some time, it remained a side project where I'd spend about 4 hours per week maximum. Meanwhile the number of users grew slowly but steadily thanks to word-of-mouth from my friends and their friends and their friends... After I sold my main startup in 2012, I finally found the time and fully realized the huge potential of Lebenslauf.com. So I started making it my main project in 2013 and at some point charged money for the created PDF files, which instantly led to five-figure revenues. About one year later (2014), I sold it to https://xing.com https://xing.com (public company, essentially the German LinkedIn) for a higher seven-digit figure. I managed to get competing bids for it from multiple companies, so the whole sale process is a story of its own. It's still astonishing to see what has grown out of it and how many people use it every day, and it was an exciting journey with totally different experiences than a venture-funded company.

TheBiv 10y ago
>> I managed to get competing bids for it from multiple companies, so the whole sale process is a story of its own. I am interested in hearing this story! :) Thank you for the original comment as well!
- thomasbachem 10y ago
  Talks with other companies started when I planned to rent out white-labeled versions of the site to job portals etc., so they could have their very own branded CV editor and possibly get a revenue share. During a lunch with the CEO of a German job portal, where we were talking about a white label, he asked me whether it was possible for them to get access to the CV data of my existing users. I replied "You'd need to buy the site then" without actually thinking about it. He in return asked for a price and I came up with 400k euros just to double it in an email hours later ("after carefully calculating again..." ooops double the price :D). When he still was interested, it struck me that a sale might be worth pursuing. I then contacted his biggest German competitors to get counter offers, and they seemed pretty interested too. Funny anecdote: The CEO of one company told me that they're not actually interested at that price, but that I should tell the others they'd offer a million euros, just because he liked me and wanted his competitors to overpay. He even told me he would confirm that offer if they ask him. I didn't do it of course. In contrast to the others, XING offered me a deal with a lower upfront payment but a huge earnout upside. I spent quite a few months tracking, testing and analyzing my users' behavior in regard to the earnout KPIs, calculating whether the deal would be better for me and of course negotiating during that time to make it even better. That's essentially it, I tried to go into as many details as possible without getting into trouble :)

mbesto 10y ago

I've helped several buyers of 2-4 man companies (mainly SaaS). Feel free to reach out.

jkingsbery 10y ago

If you are interested in stories of that nature, http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ talks about the process of two guys who've done that before and are in the middle of doing it now. Rob Walling has a separate site, http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ http://www.softwarebyrob.com/, where he talks about the same sorts of things.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hoodoof 10y ago

The question is, if you have a company worth selling and you are a single owner and founder, is there any way to build the perception of high value, similar to the valuation perceptions created for venture backed startups?

HappyTypist 10y ago
Yes. Hire a PR company, pump out your metrics, and optimize for short term revenue / profit growth.

known 10y ago

A bank in Germany has just one employee http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-a-bank-in-germany-has-just-one-employee/20130215.htm http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-a-ban...