My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

https://mohddanish.me/my-bootstrapped-micro-startup-got-acquired-for-usd22k-10

by myth_drannon • 7 years ago

233 79 7 years ago

Sounds 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.

hanniabu2• 7 years ago

At the same time a bird in the hand is worth more than 2 in the bush.

TAForObvReasons• 7 years ago

Not 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• 7 years ago

Except in this analogy the two birds in the bush give you a continuous stream of their eggs.

jasonkester• 7 years ago

SaaS maps better to Golden Goose analogies.

jjeaff• 7 years ago

That's what a present value calculation is for.

travbrack• 7 years ago

Are you willing to share the app name?

robjan• 7 years ago

In 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• 7 years ago

i mean in a western country the dude himself is at least worth at minimum a $100.000/yr salary

kamban• 7 years ago

This 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.

encoderer2• 7 years ago

Developing 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_be2• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years ago

Find 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?

encoderer2• 7 years ago

If 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• 7 years ago

Don'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.

sondr3• 7 years ago

Negative feedback does not mean your product is bad, just look at the Show HN post for Dropbox (and discussions about this post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863. I especially love that the top post is someone saying that this is trivial to make on your own, something I hear far too often.

bsaul• 7 years ago

Negative feedback is better than no feedback. at least you know the person was sufficiently attracted to your product and idea and try it. It’s an opportunity to improve, and it’s also an encouragement. I’ve had people giving me bad feedback and then a few years later come back and finally use it. At this point i knew my product had improved.

Also, you’d be surprised how most people sound harsh but actually don’t really mean to. They’ll most likely completely change their tone after you’ve contacted them and tell them you’d like their opinion on future improvements. Also, if by any chance those people finaly use your product, you have a high chance that they become strong proponents and advertisers for your product.

ericd• 7 years ago

If that's most of what's holding you back, you should try to power through that anxiety, I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised. Most people who bother to write in are very kind, and if you're this anxious about negative feedback, I'm guessing you're not the type to try the obnoxious stuff that pisses people off enough to write in with negative feedback. Making it very easy to cancel will help too.

jwr• 7 years ago

Negative feedback doesn't matter unless it's from customers (or potential customers). People tend to worry too much about negative feedback from non-customers. A good example of non-customers eager to provide negative feedback is right here: HN :-)

I've been running a SaaS for a couple of years now and learned to take all feedback from customers very, very seriously, but also largely ignore feedback from non-customers. As an example, most people who whine about your B2B SaaS being "too expensive", are non-customers. I did some experiments with discounts, these people inevitably leave anyway.

Most real customers will give you feedback that is constructive, which immediately makes it positive. E.g. rather than whine or complain they will point out a missing feature or show how the software fails.

So, while anxiety is very real (solo founder anxiety is a major issue), it should not come from negative feedback.

charliepark2• 7 years ago

I hear you.

There's a good chance that, if you're like me, your anxiety about putting it out there leads you to tell yourself that if you just do this one other feature that it'll be ready. So you wait, and you do it. But it isn't quiiiite there yet. So you repeat that cycle. After a while, you've built up your expectations — both of how good it'd have to be to receive attention, and of what kind of attention you'd need to receive to justify the investment of time — that it's almost an impossible bar to meet. So … you don't ship.

I'd encourage you to ship things earlier in the process. As Matt Mullenweg said, "if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long." (https://ma.tt/2010/11/one-point-oh/)

I'd also be more than happy to give you friendly-but-honest feedback, if it'll help. Email in profile.

TurkishPoptart• 7 years ago

Nice! Any suggestions on people/groups to follow on indiehackers? Have you been to any of their meetups?

kresten• 7 years ago

Hard 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• 7 years ago

Salaries aren't in that range generally in South East Asia, where I gather the author is from.

bighitbiker3• 7 years ago

Yea, you'll really only find salaries like that in America.

harrisonjackson• 7 years ago

He was bootstrapped and sold it for more than he would have made working full-time for another company or contracting for those 9 months, so kudos for coming out ahead!

He basically ripped off a github repo curated list of APIs and made it "searchable" + listed to PH then sold the site based on the traffic from that one spike. Not belittling it at all - he had the initiative to build it, monetize it, and sell it.

TrackerFF• 7 years ago

He could use those funds to fund another product.

Venture capital can be absolutely horrendous in some areas, and you're stuck with either

1) Go to the bank and get a normal business loan

2) VC peanuts with terrible conditions

3) Work hard and save up money, get co-founders and pool your money.

Not saying that it's not like that in tech-hubs, but I'm in one of the most expensive countries in the world, and our VC community is so underdeveloped that it's shameful.

(Also, I see the author is located in Southern Asia, so that's probably a nice payout.)

j45• 7 years ago

Congrats to you, this is more than most have accomplished.

loriverkutya• 7 years ago

nope, it's not

chrift2• 7 years ago

I certainly have never sold a product I developed. Have you?

simplify• 7 years ago

If 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• 7 years ago

Unless 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• 7 years ago

I'm not sure if the first offer was really for the startup or rather just for the domain.

jacurtis2• 7 years ago

$22k is a hell of a lot to pay for a hyphenated .xyz domain. I doubt they bought it for the domain.

sdan• 7 years ago

For reference, you can pick up .xyz domains for a dollar on namecheap (last time I checked).

antsar• 7 years ago

A domain with traffic though.

ggmartins• 7 years ago

congrats, 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!

4ndrewl• 7 years ago

Congratulations - what a great story! It's somehow much more satisfying to read this than ludicrous $Billion acquisitions in SV. Seems more human.

PaywallBuster2• 7 years ago

First 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• 7 years ago

My 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 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• 7 years ago

if 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• 7 years ago

Actually 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.

C1sc0cat3• 7 years ago

Why 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.

PaywallBuster2• 7 years ago

I had previous colleague from India, two years of experience and suddenly was a senior.

I thought it was more common over there... guess not so odd.

onion2k• 7 years ago

It's really common in startups everywhere. CTO is just shorthand for "the technical co-founder".

nif2ee2• 7 years ago

It'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_• 7 years ago

Sorry, what do you mean?!

nif2ee2• 7 years ago

I 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.

spottybanana• 7 years ago

Creating value and capturing value are different things. If you start doing open source, you shouldn't except money. If you want money, you should do something that people usually pay for.

It is common knowledge that open source can be very difficult to monetize. If you are smart enough to program good software you should be able to understand also that. Also if you can program good quality open source software, it shouldn't be difficult to switch to the "evil capitalistic" side and code some software with an actual business model.

It is best to work on open source at the point where you have enough savings so you don't need the money. Creating open source with the exception of monetization is just stupid - sometimes it happens but usually not, and that should be excepted.

geofft• 7 years ago

Sure, for an individual, what you say is exactly the correct approach.

But for society, does it benefit us to pay people to work on scraping websites more than on OSS infrastructure? (One argument is yes because that's how the money flows, but why?) How do we as society fund OSS infrastructure and prevent people who would be good at it from leaving to seek money?

bilekas• 7 years 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!

chrift2• 7 years ago

This 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• 7 years ago

It'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• 7 years ago

Congratulations 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!

My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

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