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My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired
- throwaway13337 7y agoSounds like the buyer got a terrific deal. There seemed to be rapid growth and interest. Getting any revenue is hard - growing from 700/month to 7000/month can be mostly momentum. Just sitting on it would make more. Maybe there is more to the story but if not, please hold out with your next project. You'll get low ballers. I had someone offer me 30k for an app I spent a month building. I would have taken it but he wanted to do a payment plan and I said no way. The project has since grown without much help from me to ~2.5k/month and will likely continue for years. It already made more than the offer. The ability to sell it is still there at any time and for more money just from the momentum of growth. Once you sell, though, you stop collecting revenue and having the potential of growing it even bigger. If someone wants it at first, it's likely worth more than they're offering. They know it and you should, too.
- hanniabu 7y agoAt the same time a bird in the hand is worth more than 2 in the bush.
- TAForObvReasons 7y agoNot sure why this is downvoted, "growing from 700/month to 7000/month can be mostly momentum" is trivializing what is more likely a very difficult scaling process, and there is a huge opportunity cost to continue to operating the business as opposed to cashing out and trying the next thing.
- socceroos 7y agoExcept in this analogy the two birds in the bush give you a continuous stream of their eggs.
- flarg 7y agoKilling the golden goose
- rlonn 7y agounless they're both male birds. Perhaps also bad-tempered, shrieking a lot and prone to peck you on the head or take a dump on your shoes. It's amazing how analogies never fail to clarify and raise discussions to new heights!
- hhjinks 7y agoYes, but those two asshole male birds might be celebrities, attracting tonnes of thirsty female, egg-laying birds to your bush. Didn't think of that, did you?
- hanniabu 7y agoYou're hoping it does. There are no guarantees about the future.
- jasonkester 7y agoSaaS maps better to Golden Goose analogies.
- jjeaff 7y agoThat's what a present value calculation is for.
- travbrack 7y agoAre you willing to share the app name?
- robjan 7y agoIn the screenshots, it seems like most of the traffic came from sites like HN and PH so the traffic may not have been sustained in the future.
- jonasft 7y agoi mean in a western country the dude himself is at least worth at minimum a $100.000/yr salary
- kamban 7y agoThis is interesting, I am building a few SaaS products, one has gotten around 4 paid customers. I was thinking to sell it, but maybe I should try to bring in more momentum.
- encoderer 7y agoDeveloping a SaaS product isn’t for everybody but if you are a developer and want to expand your breadth it’s a wonderful and rewarding challenge. Nothing is easy but there has never been more resources, support and tooling for indie SaaS makers. If you want to get started the indiehackers community is fantastic and my inbox is always open for answers/encouragement Shane at Cronitor.io
- woutr_be 7y agoThe hardest part about building a SaaS product for me isn't the technical challenges (although there are some too), it's mostly anxiety. The thing that scares me the most is launching and receiving negative feedback, the thought alone is enough for me to stop working on it.
- AdrianEGraphene 7y agoFind someone who's already building a useful SaaS product that they're willing to take the responsibility for, and help them build it. If it fails, at least that person takes the brunt of the negative feedback?
- woutr_be 7y agoI would honestly much rather overcome my fears. Being a solo founder and running a company is one of my goals.
- encoderer 7y agoIf you are sensitive to negative feedback it’s likely you are also sensitive to positive feedback, and it comes in roughly equal amounts. I have an email file of positive feedback received over the years. When I read stuff like “Thanks for such an excellent product. I really like it in our stack.” It lifts my spirits again and again. It’s actually a chore to get a meaningful critique from a customer they just don’t care enough and will just cancel.
- glangdale 7y agoDon't internalize the feedback. There will always be haters and bashers (we had people trolling the newspaper article comment section when we got bought by Intel). The point is that if you provide a valuable service to someone you'll get meaningful feedback from them (maybe not all good!) and you can learn from that. Don't pay attention to people who are just recreationally crapping on you and you'll be fine. If you try to launch something, and it doesn't go well for anyone - well, you learned something. I do a martial art (Brazilian Juijitsu) where one of the cliches is "you win or you learn". It may be a cliche, but it applies to a lot of things. But to extend the metaphor, you have to get on the mat.
- kresten 7y agoHard to make sense of an acquisition at a cost this low. It’s like a month or two salary of a senior software engineer.
- HeyZuess 7y agoSalaries aren't in that range generally in South East Asia, where I gather the author is from.
- bighitbiker3 7y agoYea, you'll really only find salaries like that in America.
- jen729w 7y agoOr Europe or Australia. So, y’know, all of the developed world. (With apologies to whomever I have inevitably missed.)
- noir_lord 7y agoYes and no, in Europe outside London and Berlin (big capitals) you’ll find that developer salaries are much lower than expected compared to the US. That’s pretty much across the board.
- j45 7y agoCongrats to you, this is more than most have accomplished.
- loriverkutya 7y agonope, it's not
- chrift 7y agoI certainly have never sold a product I developed. Have you?
- simplify 7y agoIf I'm not mistaken, 22k is roughly the amount you would get for placing a single software engineer in a recruitment pipeline. Job-seeking traffic is quite valuable.
- manuelflara 7y agoUnless I'm mistaken I think he sold public-apis.xyz, the product the main story is about, and not the TweetJobs.dev one (or maybe I'm mistaken, or maybe he sold both?)
- steve1977 7y agoI'm not sure if the first offer was really for the startup or rather just for the domain.
- jacurtis 7y ago$22k is a hell of a lot to pay for a hyphenated .xyz domain. I doubt they bought it for the domain.
- mddanishyusuf 7y agoNo, It's complete product sale.
- OkiiEli 7y agocongratulations!! keep it up
- ggmartins 7y agocongrats, you're on track for a big thing super curious to know how much you were paying to deliver 30k page views/month and 60k. Any chance to share? Thanks a lot!
- mddanishyusuf 7y ago$0 only some good SEO keywords and time.
- ggmartins 7y agofantastic! Can I ask you what did you use for web hosting? any of the web hosting supported by gatsby.js? thanks!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 4ndrewl 7y agoCongratulations - what a great story! It's somehow much more satisfying to read this than ludicrous $Billion acquisitions in SV. Seems more human.
- PaywallBuster 7y agoFirst of all, congratulations on the sale. Second, funny that his first job after graduation was CTO. Can't see that happening anywhere in EU or US heh
- tingletech 7y agoMy first job out of college (after a failed start up) in 1995 was as Vice President of Computer Operations for Experienced Attorney's Referral Service dba LawInfo. Just checked out their site, and it looks like they sold to Thomson Reuters. edit: Actually, I just remembered I worked for Bill Blue at https://datelsys.com https://datelsys.com for 6 weeks at the end of '94 doing phone support for new internet users. I think subscribers doubled in the 6 weeks I was there. Only lasted about 6 months at LawInfo. Been working in the library since 96.
- ido 7y agoif you read the description of what he was doing it sounds like it was just a fancy title for "the only technical person handling all the computer-stuff in the company".
- n_ary 7y agoActually more absurdity is possible in EU. I frequently notice, out of college PM(grad scheme), 1yoe Senior Engineer/Team Lead, out of college R&D Engineer(with BSc only), 2yoe CTO etc.. These are mostly in UK though but still counts.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoWhy is a new grad R&D Engineer strange? that's certainly most of the people recruited at the first place I worked (UK) started as. OK they wont be at the same level as the Boss (the President of the Mechanical engineers at the time) What sort of people do you thein NASA JPL etc. recruit from university in the main.
- bagacrap 7y agoPresumably those with graduate degrees.
- nif2ee 7y agoIt's heartbreaking to see people who scrape websites and make 60k in a weekend project while opensource maintainers for projects used by thousands of companies are begging for 10 dollars a month
- naveen_ 7y agoSorry, what do you mean?!
- nif2ee 7y agoI mean, unlike theoretically preached by old billionaires and millionaires trying to trick the public and rewrite their own history, making money is usually at odds with creating real value. It's usually about marketing, PR and gaming the system.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI'm generally sympathetic to your stated frustration, but it's a little more complicated than that.
- malshe 7y agoI am well aware that on HN marketing is looked down upon but marketing is about creating and delivering value to customers. If someone is doing that better than others and getting paid a lot for that, there is nothing wrong with it.
- ben509 7y agoPart of it is a big chunk of the HN crowd hasn't been in business, and part of it is that marketing is an ethical mess. And HN is engineer heavy, so we see how a product comes from raw materials and is built into a thing you can use, and see how those roles are adding value. It's easy to understand that a cut diamond is worth more than a raw diamond. But a product also has more value if it's on a shelf in a store than sitting in a warehouse, thus a person driving a delivery truck is adding value. And the mutual gain from the transaction is realized when questions are answered and the transaction is settled, so the cashier is adding value. Bringing it back to marketing, the transaction can't even begin until the customers are aware of the product and understand that it meets a need they have, so the marketer is adding value by enabling that to happen. But I've got no proof beyond the observation that people get paid to do these things, and it could be that some or all of these jobs really are redundant. Anyone can settle the debate empirically by starting a business that doesn't rely on them, though.
- bilekas 7y ago> Right after I graduated, I was very blessed to land myself as a CTO(Chief Technology Officer) at one of the startup tech companies in the co-working space industry. Umm... What ? That's insane.. But always good to hear some good stories once in a while!
- coleifer 7y agoNice word salad.
- chrift 7y agoThis is really interesting, well done! Seems like you're getting a lot of cynical people on here, you might be interested in posting this story on indiehackers.com
- sillycube 7y agoIt's not easy to find product market fit. If there are so much traffic and customers, I will probably try to scale the project instead of selling it. Who knows if the next project will take off again? As a bootstrap developer, if you cannot nail marketing, you will just have the same problem in the next project
- fajarsiddiqfs 7y agoCongratulations Danish! :) I help him with this writing of the blog post 50% when we are on the ferry ride from indonesia to singapore. I'm glad a domain .xyz can build a microstartup "side project turn to profitable business" and you get acquired. I'm really proud of you!
- mddanishyusuf 7y agoHey, Thanks Fajar for helping to motivate me do that. You are my man.