bitbotbit

Thanks for the feedback. Namely, there's a number of other product ideas I think could be higher growth that I'd like to explore. Recently moved to SV from a fly-over state, and think may finally have the potential to leverage an SV network for mentorship/advice.

A lot of the feedback I've gotten from founders has broken down in the following sense: if the person has grown and sold a company before of >= 10M ARR, they typically say shut it down ASAP and move on. If the founder has never grown and sold a business before, they advise to keep it running.

When you say much easier time in future, any specifics outside of raising? Does professional network find an exit much more impressive than just running business profitably for number of years?

Thanks for the feedback!

This is after our salaries (ie pre-salaries 375K operating profit per year). No short-term capex (serving upgrades to future proof 2-3 years recently completed). Cash in back account growing monthly.

Has anyone sold their company, then regretted it from a time investment standpoint?

Not having a strong understanding of the market from the get-go and not having an employee to run the business after 6 years is correlated in the following sense:

Founders have a large amount of surface area to cover (office, accounting, insurance, payroll, legal, taxes, hiring, management, etc). If you are in a market that doesn't allow you to grow quickly enough to hire in a large enough team to cover these functions (plus the meat and potatoes of the actual product and customer requirements), you can be left stretched extremely thin. If founders are covering 15 different company functions, it hard to find someone who can handily take over.

For context, we got into the situation we're in based on not having a strong understanding of the market/ unit economics from the get-go. It's taken heroic efforts from the team and a significantly large, complex technical product to be viable. Many lessons learned, not least to code less and do market/customer discovery straight-away.

Thanks for the feedback, your points are all valid.

Good point. Could work on other things while at the office, but seems difficult to have enough time while down a founder, and trying to run and M&A at the same time.

This is a concern. It could result in needing to either do the job of employees who leave myself, or need to train in temp staff. Either efforts could dilute the viability of spending sufficient time on M&A.

Some of the problems we thought we'd face moving management to someone else are well outlined in http://jacquesmattheij.com/sell-it-or-run-it-there-is-no-mid..., posted earlier this year on HN.

Mostly opportunity cost. We think finding a good candidate to hire and run the business is likely a 9-12 month proposition, which could still fail after the hire (bringing the founders back in).

Handing off day-to-day management: We explored this option in depth by speaking with as many founders as possible who had attempted this. Ultimately, the consensus was that unless you have an employee who is positioned to and interested in increasing their role, finding a good candidate to assume leadership is extremely difficult (a 9-12 mo proposition). Then there's still pretty decent odds once on the job they'll fail or leave, forcing the founders back into the business. When the team is so small, it seems the founders cover so much surface area its difficult to replace them. Of course, this could be our failing to train, delegate, and operationalize the business.

Thanks for the perspective, really appreciate it! Good to hear experience of running a profitable business may be sufficient.