91–100 of 251 posts
IH is/was, unfortunately, full of unsubstantiated stories and made up numbers, presented by owners trying to upsell their business, without any verification or "hard questions" by the site owner.
As we see, this worked.
I'm not sure what's the lesson here. Fact-checking is for losers maybe?
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…
A serious question...
While going from a blog-to-acquisition in less than a year is an impressive feat, there have been suspicious circumstances around IndieHackers submissions to Hacker News including clickbait titles that are frequently fixed by HN mods, and in one case, explicit voting manipulation with an attempt to bypass the voting ring detector via linking to /newest: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg This acquisition sends a disappoi…
Interesting. Don't hate the player, hate game, though. welcome to the jungle.
First of all, congrats to csallen, I have been following your journey from the day you launched on HN and it was fascinating to follow along. If you haven't read his month in review posts, highly recommended. I hope it's not taboo to speculate on the acquisition price, so here's my take : * extrapolating a $5k/month revenue to a year = $60k/year * acquisition price is roughly 2-4x yearly revenue so $120k to $240k * P…
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 going to guess they got it for a song with a job for the owner and his brother attached and the promise that they could focus on content and not selling ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? No, the "entrenched organization" that regulates voting rings exists to keep HN from turning into a morass of marketing puff. The quality of the submissions and comments are literally the only thing of value here.
You can do that by restricting voting to established users with nonzero karma, which HN already does. If a bunch of people who are providing the high-quality submissions and comments say a particular submission is high-quality, what are the grounds for doubting them?
That's a really unexpected announcement, but congratulations! Hope this changes the site for the better, not the worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. Don't hate the player, hate game, though. welcome to the jungle.
As long as Stripe knows what they bought. The way I see it, they didn't buy a popular website, but a determined person willing to do anything to get what he wants.
Does this mean IndieHackers become the propaganda arm for Stripe's customers? Or is this a goodwill purchase? Maybe it's cheaper than a national ad buy targeted directly at potential new customers?
There's a lot of alignment between what I want to see (personally) and encourage (via Indie Hackers) and what Stripe's mission is: more people starting companies and finding success . It goes much further than simply advertising. If Indie Hackers and other efforts to inspire + educate + empower entrepreneurs can grow to have sufficient impact, then it will materially improve Stripe's bottom line. And of course, Indie…
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 buil…