dropkick

My father owns a small payment processing company that does electronic processing of checks. One of his employees was busted by a federal task force for laundering a lot of money. The task force initially accused my father of being the ring leader. My father cooperated fully with the investigation, gave the task force emails, documents, etc. He had nothing to hide. They were still threatening him with prosecution so my father hired a very expensive attorney in D.C. and they eventually declined to prosecute. Total cost $20,000.

It's a lot of money but not $1.5 million. A large majority of innocent people don't end up at trial. Even a lot of the guilty people don't end up at trial. My dad's ex-employee became a witness for the government against the money launderers and avoided going to trial.

There are 30 developers on the project I work on. So if you get 1000 customers just like us. You're making $5000/month to handle the load of 30,000 daily users. Chances are you'll have to handle support too.

Not sure if we're typical or how much load 30,000 users would generate. Personally, I pull/push at least once a day. Just something for you to keep in mind.

It's undeniably an awesome deal and I really like the website design.

I get a little concerned about the business model. Almost to the point that it would prevent me from hosting my code with them for fear of them going out of business or raising their prices later.

The current git repo for the commercial product I work on is 850MB. This is millions of lines of code + 8-9 years of development (migrated from svn at some point). That means we could be happy at the $5 month range.

If you get 1000 customers X $5, you're making $5000/month. I make way more than that as an employee.

Of course, you have people that will need more than 2GB but I think it's rare.

tl;dr raise your prices. I think it will help you get more business.

FYI, it only does reading but it's still very impressive. I've tried out the demo and it just works against small repos. It's very slow against larger ones.

One thing about being an American living in another country has made me realize about the USA is that there are tons of police compared to other countries. This is a good and bad thing. It's a bad thing when you're being pulled over and harassed for looking suspicious. It's a good thing when you have bullies like this. If you call the police, they will usually respond promptly and eagerly looking to make an arrest.

I think w3schools bashing is unjustified. It's good enough for most things. I use it all the time for a quick reference. I've never found anything there blatantly wrong or misleading besides the domain name.

Looking at the list on w3fools, it seems a little pedantic (aka nitpicky).

If you want to work hard, feel appreciated, and have opportunity, start or join a startup.

From my experience working at Microsoft, the author sounds clueless. Large companies will eat your soul because they like the souls of naive young developers who think they can get ahead by being smart and working hard at large companies.

What is really cool about this story is knowing that PG keeps such close tabs on the HN community.

No, it's the snappy uniforms!

Our brains can only superimpose our romantic fantasies over reality for so long. One romantic fantasy would be "I'm cool because I work at Apple". I can't see a talented person working somewhere for more than a year or two unless they genuinely were satisfied with the job and environment. Money isn't the only thing that motivates people.

A few years ago, I wrote a commercial plugin for a product and later sold the IP to the developer of the product I plugged in to. I'm intentionally being as vague as possible to remain anonymous.

My plugin was on the market for about 9months. In that time, my revenue was in the $60k range. The sale price was around 6x the revenue. However, it was spread out over a few years of me being employed by the purchaser. Of course, I got a nice salary in addition to the purchase price.

One thing that made my situation interesting is that a competitor of the product I plugged in to was interested in me doing the same thing for their product. Once they got wind of the negotiations, they immediately made me an offer. It turned into a bidding war for my IP/company.

My observations from what you've described:

you will almost certainly be expected to work for the purchaser since it sounds like you are the sole developer. They are essentially buying your services and the IP. So don't give them a reason to be wary of you working for them.

On what to ask for: Unless you have revenue, there is no way to objectively quantify at least a minimum value of your IP. There is an art to negotiation that is beyond this post but you've already got them to admit that you will make them millions. I think that is an excellent start. The best negotiators are willing to walk away from the deal. Determine a minimum you want ahead of time and then be prepared to walk away if you don't get it.

If you just want out then act accordingly. Give them a price that you know will keep them interested.

In my case, it took several months between the initial exchange of interest and serious negotiations to begin. They first contacted me in January, An email with an offer price arrived out of nowhere in May.

What I would do differently:

I would have asked for an earn-out instead of a flat price. I didn't know about this until I talked to a few other entrepreneurs. Basically, you give up guaranteed money for a cut of the action from your IP. You're assuming part of the risk. Big company with big marketing budget drives your product to success and you get a cut. It's a very common thing in product acquisitions.

When the competitor made an offer, I disclosed the other company's offer. I should have let them make me an independent offer. Even though there was a bidding war, the price stayed pretty close to the initial offer by the first company.