I almost sold Baremetrics for $5M

They were so notorious for it back then, that when they attempted to do it to Netscape, Marc Andreessen went into the meeting knowing ahead of time to document everything. That documentation was useful later during the anti-trust proceedings.

From the 2000 Wired article The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth:

> It was two months later, on June 21, that Reback received a call from Jim Clark, the chair of one of his firm's newest clients, Netscape. Earlier that day, Clark said, a team of Microsoft executives had visited Netscape's headquarters, met with its CEO, Jim Barksdale, its technical wunderkind, Marc Andreessen, and its marketing chief, Mike Homer, and offered them a "special relationship." If Netscape would abandon much of the browser market to Microsoft; if it would agree not to compete with Microsoft in other areas; if it would let Microsoft invest in Netscape and have a seat on its board, everything between the two companies would be wine and roses. If not ...

> "They basically said, OK, we have this nice shit sandwich for you," Mike Homer told me later. "You can put a little mustard on it if you want. You can put a little ketchup on it. But you're going to eat the fucking thing or we're going to put you out of business."

> The next day, Reback phoned Joel Klein, the former deputy White House counsel who had recently been named the second-ranking lawyer in the antitrust division, and persuaded him to send Netscape a CID for some detailed notes Andreessen had taken during the meeting.

> Asked by Tobey why he'd taken notes on the meeting, Andreessen replied, "I thought that it might be a topic of discussion at some point with the US government on antitrust issues." (During the trial, Microsoft would cite the comment as evidence that the meeting was a setup, and Netscape and the DOJ would retort that Andreessen was just being sarcastic. "Bullshit, on both counts," Andreessen told me. "I'd read all the books. I knew their MO. We were a little startup. They were Microsoft, coming to town. I thought, Uh-oh. I know what happens now.")

https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/

Sounds harsh? Well non-refundable deposits are a thing in real estate. For example in my country it is common to put 0.25% down to take the property off the market, non refundable, allowing you to do due diligence and then 19.75% deposit within 5 days non-refundable, with a closing period of say 30 days to pony up the other 80%, usually from finance. Probably the 19.75% is lost if finance doesn't come through but IANAL not sure if that holds up court or not or if you can get it back in some circumstances. But people understand it's serious you might lose it.

If you don't really need to sell but wouldn't mind $5m this would be a good way to weed out non-serious people. If everyone says NO then that's OK you keep on running the business as before. If anyone says yes then you know they are serious. They might not buy, but you get $50k compensation, which might be less than your costs, but the point is the $50k is like a way of communicating information 'we are serious' than an actual payment.

Asking for $50k from someone who invests $5m is like asking $50 deposit for someone who wants to book a luxury hotel room for a week. Maybe I should have said $100k (!)