11 ms·
Ran a web agency from ‘08-‘13, grew it to 20 FTEs fully remote then sold it. A few accelerants: 1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the
by awb 5y ago
Ran a web agency from ‘08-‘13, grew it to 20 FTEs fully remote then sold it.
A few accelerants:
1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US.
2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me.
3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.
- maxrev17 5y agoThis sounds great, but in the UK the tax implications mean sadly it is better to retain money in a business and drip feed it over retirement :p haha
- throwaway1777 5y agoFirst one doesn’t work anymore with remote being so common they demand the same wages as everywhere else.
- urthor 5y agoIt works. These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans. Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months. You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer. -------------------------------------------------------- Startup engineering management is so simple. Buy a copy of Mythical Man Month. Read it, read it again. Then re-read chapter 3. Get two of the best, your Captain and your Copilot. Encourage them to hire a pimply faced minion to edit the config files so they feel important, and so you avoid single point of dependency. These days, get someone else who lives in Estonia/Ukraine/Sri Lanka for follow the sun support. If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers. ------------------------------------------------------- Your secret path to success with international hiring is to avoid any country you know the name of. Don't think you're thinking out of the box hiring from Brazil/Israel. Hunt down a decent dev from Ghana or Georgia. If my Slack/Discord buddies are anything to go by, there's an extraordinary amount of gems out there who've made the choice to raise their kids in their home countries. There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago> If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers. Oh, I half thought you were serious until this point. I still don't get the joke though.
- fsloth 5y agoDepends on the product what you actually need, but I've personally watched more than one successfull software product launched with a more or less this resourcing. Not exactly this recipe but very much in the ballpark. The assistants aren't assistants - you hire them with minimum pressure, but try still to find the most talented junior you can find.
- urthor 5y agoI'm sure you can be elastic with the mids depending on how much AWS there is to configure or some-such. 2 juniors in a startup is a bit, probably not the right thing. You'll run out of junior work surely? The "two good ones plus exactly one junior to make them feel important, and to keep the show on the road for 2 weeks in case they both quit simultaneously" formula is pretty solid.
- fsloth 5y agoTo be specific, my experience was from non-web software. I would consider "junior" here not as a person in non-critical role who cannot function as an individual contributor, but as a solid candidate that lacks industry experience but can be at the moment hiring be expected to quite fast grow into the role of a solid IC. I.e to use a bit too stereotypical characterization - not a "stablehand" but a "journeyman apprentice". At the moment of hiring you don't count on it that they can deliver (but guess and hope), whereas the seniors will have shipped products under their belt.
- urthor 5y agoOh well that's fine. My brain just operates very strictly as: Junior = apprentice, first job or similar. Mid = journeyman, "worked another job before". Independent, trusted to be delegated to for specific things, but doesn't quite have a personal brand. Senior = Master. Proven track record, proven reputation of delivering, capable of leadership inside a technical project. Has and maintains a reputation as someone you can trust. Principal = Mentor to seniors. Ofc there are shades of grey between junior and mid, because junior-ship takes like 2-3 years to grow out of. The list of work able to be delegated to someone at the start is not all that large in many cases.
- k8sToGo 5y agoI was wondering, how do you sell a company? It's not like there is an eBay or craigslist for companies, right?
- smt88 5y agoThere are several, including Flippa: https://flippa.com https://flippa.com
- cpach 5y agoFE International is another one: https://feinternational.com/ https://feinternational.com/
- paradite 5y agoJustin Kan (co-founder of Twitch) said he sold his startup on eBay: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/63456874504071853140487069918655519200396087339641441958069865021981702750209 https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200... And there is also https://microacquire.com/ https://microacquire.com/
- folli 5y agoWhat the hell did I just witness here? An NFT instructional video?
- paradite 5y agoI am also a bit shocked to see the first Google search result for "Twitch Justin ebay sell" was this link to opensea. Looks like they did good SEO. Also there was a lot of promotion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1396904507871793154 https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1396904507871793154
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- colordrops 5y ago
- sockpuppet69 5y ago
- awb 5y agoOh and: 4) Optimized for SEO. About 50% of my business came from referrals, the other 50% SEO.