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IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

indiehackers.com

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Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#41

Post by nitam »

pc wrote: post #18

Patrick from Stripe here. I wanted to quickly chime in to emphasize that our goal in acquiring Indie Hackers is to simply ensure that the site becomes as successful as possible. The Stripe upside we're hoping for is that more companies get started and that they're more successful . We already see a very large fraction of new internet companies choose Stripe; we're mainly hoping that Indie Hackers can help us grow the…

You can help us help you by a) becoming available in more countries b) Atlas LLC

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#42

Post by zazpowered »

petercooper wrote: post #39
nugget wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers are low. They didn't buy a suburban lawn care business. I'd ballpark >$1m up front and >$250k annual comp with upside going forward, in some mix of cash and stock. Great move by Stripe. Congrats to Courtland for the exit and what seems like a win-win for both parties.

I'm not so sure. I haven't seen the higher big ticket multiples scale down to smaller businesses very well (only in the small biz media negotiations I've been involved in or tipped off about - so I am no expert!). I'd certainly take a 16x revenue multiple any day of the week though :-D

They didn't buy the site really for the revenue so it's hard to go off of that when estimating acquisition price

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#44

Post by tobltobs »

brilliantcode wrote: post #20

2 months ago, HN was ripping apart IH: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13591182 But at HN, it seems we have short memories and money triumphs morality.

The thread you link to is about a story which was published on IH. Sure, publishing this story wasn't a highlight for IH, but starting two swing the morality hammer is a bit much.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#45

Post by csallen »

dollaholla wrote: post #38

So in the spirit of what IH actually is, will the financial details be shared?

As much as I would personally love to share, there are of course other employees working at Stripe and other acquisitions that Stripe will make in the future, which complicates things. What I will do is try to be as transparent as I possibly can about what's going on behind-the-scenes, traffic numbers, product and growth strategy, etc. I've always thought it was cool that I got to talk about growing Indie Hackers itself at the same time that I've been talking to other entrepreneurs.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#46

Post by superasn »

One of my favorite sites that provided real value. I guess IndieHackers did a lot of things right which created such fast growth with a quick exit.

1) Great design. Really professional feel (even though it just a wordpress blog)

2) Regular updated content to keep visitors coming back.

3) Highly targeted to hacker community / product creators - no wonder it was featured over and over again on the front page

4) In built SEO and traffic. People who are featured on it link back to it. People link to it for inspiration (great social signals).

What else? Anyone else wanna chime in?

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#47

Post by sboselli »

minimaxir wrote: post #25
draw_down wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else suspect "clickbait" is now the #1 most-used word in HN comments?

This is one of the rare instances where it is correctly used. (In IH's case, submission titles with explicit dollar amounts, which also breaks the HN rule about using original titles) EDIT: Apparently an exception was made in this case.

Is that rule really enforced though? Should it?

I constantly see submissions here that do not use the original title. In fact, I have noticed that some/most of the time (I regularly save links from here in a personal db) the altered titles do a better job of summarizing the article than the original title. It happens to me all the time that I choose to save the link using HN's title instead of the original (better results when using it as tags).

If there is such a rule, it might merit more/finer discussion.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#48

Post by nugget »

petercooper wrote: post #39
nugget wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers are low. They didn't buy a suburban lawn care business. I'd ballpark >$1m up front and >$250k annual comp with upside going forward, in some mix of cash and stock. Great move by Stripe. Congrats to Courtland for the exit and what seems like a win-win for both parties.

I'm not so sure. I haven't seen the higher big ticket multiples scale down to smaller businesses very well (only in the small biz media negotiations I've been involved in or tipped off about - so I am no expert!). I'd certainly take a 16x revenue multiple any day of the week though :-D

16x mature revenue, sure. But if revenue is growing 20% month over month, then what?

I see pure talent acquisitions (no tech, no site, no brand) once a month for >$500k/head. Here the founder is a course 6 (CS) MIT grad, obviously smart and talented, able to act as an evangelist to broader communities, with a pre-built launchpad in place. There's real value to that.

If the stock component vests over some period of years, it could easily run into the millions, and still be a steal by Stripe. I'll echo another comment downstream: it's interesting to think about whether, in the spirit of the site, they will (or should) reveal the economics of the deal.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#50

Post by minimaxir »

sboselli wrote: post #47
minimaxir wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the rare instances where it is correctly used. (In IH's case, submission titles with explicit dollar amounts, which also breaks the HN rule about using original titles) EDIT: Apparently an exception was made in this case.

Is that rule really enforced though? Should it? I constantly see submissions here that do not use the original title. In fact, I have noticed that some/most of the time (I regularly save links from here in a personal db) the altered titles do a better job of summarizing the article than the original title. It happens to me all the time that I choose to save the link using HN's title instead of the original (better re…

From the guidelines:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

The mods have been pretty good about making edits when appropriate.

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