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This is exactly the recipe I used and sold a company for $10m. Also, I am a absolutely terrible programmer and v1 of the product, with which this recipe was exe
by ggg9990 8y ago
This is exactly the recipe I used and sold a company for $10m. Also, I am a absolutely terrible programmer and v1 of the product, with which this recipe was executed, was full of copy pasted code, unhashed passwords, all of the hallmarks of terrible programming. I got to $100,000 revenue before a friend of mine joined who actually knew how to program and rewrote the whole thing (literally zero lines of my original code were preserved).
- csomar 8y agoCare to share what the company was?
- haskellandchill 8y agoSo? You’re a fraud enjoy your money it means nothing.
- ir0nic 8y ago"Really nice person who wants you to succeed."
- haskellandchill 8y agoWell they have already succeeded so we're good here.
- 2stop 8y agoWhy a fraud?
- PeterFBell 8y agoDon't see whats fraudulent about building something people want, use and presumably get value from.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sveng 8y agoI read this story exactly the opposite: it doesn’t have to be perfect at the start. You just build something people want, and then hire a team to improve the back end (without destroying what people wanted it for in the first place). Major companies have had security issues (such as Adobe) but that doesn’t make them a fraud.
- haskellandchill 8y agoThat's the correct reading, perfect is the enemy of good etc boring.
- lukevdp 8y agoWhat is fraudulent about that?
- haskellandchill 8y agoPlain text passwords.
- sveng 8y agoPlain text passwords are a poor security practice, not fraud per se. There’s no sense it was intentional, nor that any customers were impacted. I used the Adobe example since 38 million customers had personal information exfiltrated in 2013 (including me). Adobe knew better (or should have). But that still is not fraud. They have enhanced their security practices since then, and I am still a customer of theirs.
- virgilp 8y agoFWIW, at that time Adobe was already properly handling the password - what leaked was an old backup. Where passwords were hashed, just not properly. Adobe did mess up on that one - it's just not on the same level, not even close. The main thing that makes it worse was that Adobe has a lot of customer data (likely unlike this guy, who probably didn't have many customers)
- ggg9990 8y agoI didn’t have any idea what I was doing. When my cofounder arrived and looked at the code base... he looked like he was going to puke. Took him less than 5 minutes to decide that there wasn’t even a line worth keeping.
- bigchewy 8y agoI don't think you understand the definition of the words that you are saying. Consider looking up the definition of e.g. fraud
- haskellandchill 8y ago
- bgun 8y agoYou seem the opposite of "chill".
- haskellandchill 8y agoI'm a NYer.
- hoodoof 8y agoCan I ask a little more please? How much of the company did you own when you sold it? How did the sale happen - did someone just turn up and offer you money, or did you go find a buyer? Was there negotiation from a higher price down to $10M? Did they buy the entire company from you or just buy the software assets? How long did the sale take from when the buyer turned up till money in your account? How much money did you end up with after paying tax on the sale? What did you do to celebrate? What did you do next - another business, get a job, sit at home watching TV? Would you have handled the sale process differently if you could do it again?
- ggg9990 8y agoI made just over $1m because we raised a bunch of money for growth that didn’t pan out. Because LOL California the money went straight into a house. I still have a mortgage and a day job.
- elvirs 8y agodamn
- sheeshkebab 8y agoAnd I guess the moral of the story - don’t raise money if you got to $100k+ revenue alone by yourself?
- ggg9990 8y agoBigger lesson is to buy a house as soon as you can. I’ve made more money on paper living in this house than building the company. I kind of needed to raise the money. The wheels were falling off the bus because the software was so bad and it needed to be professionally written. I should have raised less and sold sooner though.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoUnless you live in Japan where real estate depreciates.
- davidjnelson 8y agoThat’s a wild and wonderful story. Thanks for sharing inspiration.
- csallen 8y agoIf you're at all interested in adding your story to this list or future lists, let me know! Sounds like something we could all learn from. I'm courtland@indiehackers.com
- PostOnce 8y agoHey, it's the founder of indiehackers. When I first saw indiehackers, I was in love with it. The execution was fantastic. You did a great job. Then it got bought, and changed. Now it's forum-first, interviews second, and half of them are sort of locked. Why do you now have to sign up for a forum to view the older product interviews? It's super annoying, so I just stopped reading. It also seems detrimental to the people who gave interviews early, they wanted press, rather than being hidden behind a sign up thing. Is there any interest in reverting from this pinterest-style login-wall, or is that just too costly? If this sounds blunt, it's only because I'm disappointed that a site a loved became less fun to use.
- csallen 8y agoWalling off the content directories was an experiment to boost community membership signup, as community members are far more active than anonymous visitors. It's worked — people have joined the community at a much higher rate — but the downstream results haven't been significant enough for this to really be the backbone of our growth strategy. I will likely revert it soon in favor of other approaches, for example, creating search engine friendly evergreen content like this article.
- elephant0xffff 8y agoSlightly off-topic, but what happened to indiehackers? I liked the page more before the redesign/stripe-takeover. The page was more clearly arranged and you could browse it without being logged in or having an account. There is also this ridiculous "stripe-verified" badge for businesses doing business with Stripe now, which is not that interesting for indie hackers I guess. It also seems the interviews are not that important anymore, but being some kind of community is - but I don't think that people want that, because we have that already here or at reddit - the nice thing were the interviews.