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My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

mohddanish.me

81–90 of 95 posts

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#82
post #8

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 wa…

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

That's what a present value calculation is for.

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#83
post #76
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am well aware that on HN marketing is looked down upon but marketing is about creating and delivering value to customers. If someone is doing that better than others and getting paid a lot for that, there is nothing wrong with it.

Part of it is a big chunk of the HN crowd hasn't been in business, and part of it is that marketing is an ethical mess. And HN is engineer heavy, so we see how a product comes from raw materials and is built into a thing you can use, and see how those roles are adding value. It's easy to understand that a cut diamond is worth more than a raw diamond. But a product also has more value if it's on a shelf in a store tha…

> Bringing it back to marketing, the transaction can't even begin until the customers are aware of the product and understand that it meets a need they have, so the marketer is adding value by enabling that to happen.

This is reducing marketing to advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing. Marketing research may begin even before a product exists.

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#84
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I don't work at JPL, but I do work at a different NASA center. I am one of only two people in my team of ~15 that does not have a graduate degree. There are only three with master's degrees; the rest are PhD's. You have to be both talented and incredibly lucky to secure a full time position without a graduate degree here.

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#85
post #55

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

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 s…

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?

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#86
post #83
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it is a big chunk of the HN crowd hasn't been in business, and part of it is that marketing is an ethical mess. And HN is engineer heavy, so we see how a product comes from raw materials and is built into a thing you can use, and see how those roles are adding value. It's easy to understand that a cut diamond is worth more than a raw diamond. But a product also has more value if it's on a shelf in a store tha…

> Bringing it back to marketing, the transaction can't even begin until the customers are aware of the product and understand that it meets a need they have, so the marketer is adding value by enabling that to happen. This is reducing marketing to advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing. Marketing research may begin even before a product exists.

That's fair, I was trying to keep it simple to explain my train of thought better.

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#87
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

You're hoping it does. There are no guarantees about the future.

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#88
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!

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#89

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!

[flagged]

fantastic! Can I ask you what did you use for web hosting? any of the web hosting supported by gatsby.js? thanks!

Re: My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired

#90

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 wa…

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.
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