271–280 of 320 posts
It’s a PR problem. I think it matters the name we use to call them and how they are interpreted by general public. Currently we call them like IndieHackers, bootstrapped startup, life style business. All not fancy as “unicorn” it is. We need a new PR that makes this kind of business cool for the general public. In these day if you have a profitable bootstrapped business (<1M$) people say that you should raise capital…
Totally agree with this article. It's not just about funding methods, but also playbooks for these types of businesses, and best practices. I've bootstrapped IPinfo.io to millions in revenue and a team of over 20 - so we're squarely in the "Middle class", and there's a tension between the "bootsrapper advice" (which mostly applies to optimizing for lifestyle and eliminating any risk) and "VC backed advice" (which mos…
Serious question how exactly did you come up with the idea for selling what is essentially public available info then convincing people to buy it? Is it just rate limit removal. Why do people pay for what is essentially public info. I see john deer on customers list again just blows my mind. Out of all the companies in the world you guys were like yeah lets call john deer and see if they need better ip reg info LOL?…
Getting finer grained data down to smaller groups blocks is harder and not public.
Packaging it up into easy to consume (normalized) is yet another layer of work.
As someone that has been working hard in this domain, there is one major problem to this in software. Initial funding. There is a lot of growth non dilutive capital available but the first 500k are near impossible to get without a network in old money. You used to raise that money through other local mittrlelstands. At the Masons lodge. At the local kiwanis or Rotary. But these have closed to young member decades ago…
There is a simple solution. It also give middle class an actual shot at an exit even without hitting a unicorn. This is for the groups that went to state schools not the Ivys. Take a group of 4-6 CS grads and maybe a business major. The parents of these kids form a company and bootstrap the kids by having them work from home and just covering legal costs and cloud costs with a focus on keeping costs low. They go find…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Promote employee stock ownership for American Mittelstands This is crucial. Many bootstrapped companies don't offer much stock ownership from employees. Yes, they can pay a good salary, but these employees are laying down the business brick by brick, but never see a dime of the upside. Mailchimp comes to mind. I'm sure there are others. This basically leaves stock ownership in VC-backed startups as a way to get ric…
Agree. In Germany, some Mittelstand companies do offer employee stock options which allow you to buy a certain quota of stocks per month at a pre-negotiated price which is typically much lower than market value. The idea is that over time, employees can choose to reinvest their salary into the company, thereby becoming partial owners.
Because if they do, then if the company goes bust they lose their job and their savings on the same day. See Enron as an example where employees were heavily invested in Enron.
And the company doesn't even need to go bust - a downturn in the stock price leads to some cutbacks and redundancies, and you're the unlucky one...
The first rule of investment is diversification, and keeping your salary separate to your savings seems like a good start.
By all means buy options, and sell for a quick bonus, then take the money elsewhere. If you can't sell the stock (company not yet IPO) then treat money spent on options as "lost"... In 99% of cases it will be.
That’s… not a secret. Anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of the economy knows that. You need to get out more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't what you're describing just running a regular company?
No, I actually think it's much more closely aligned with a VC business than a regular business. It's just a more "regular business" approach towards it. That is, it's still serving a large market, creating a competative advantage (which "regular businesses" rarely have), has compounding growth - it just doesn't need to rush to make it all happen in a few years in a very high risk way.
You've just described a number of regular business I know. The idea that they're not trying to create competitive advantages is...flawed.
Totally agree with this article. It's not just about funding methods, but also playbooks for these types of businesses, and best practices. I've bootstrapped IPinfo.io to millions in revenue and a team of over 20 - so we're squarely in the "Middle class", and there's a tension between the "bootsrapper advice" (which mostly applies to optimizing for lifestyle and eliminating any risk) and "VC backed advice" (which mos…
Serious question how exactly did you come up with the idea for selling what is essentially public available info then convincing people to buy it? Is it just rate limit removal. Why do people pay for what is essentially public info. I see john deer on customers list again just blows my mind. Out of all the companies in the world you guys were like yeah lets call john deer and see if they need better ip reg info LOL?…
And that's just producing the data. Making it available via a low latency and highly available API that handles over 100 billion requests per month requires some work, along with supporting data downloads in various file formats, and integrations into all of the various platforms that our customers want to use our data with.
And that's just on the engineering side of things!
But I'd say that even if our data was publicly availble (and to be fair some geolocation data is available for free - although it's generally not very accurate, and we also have other data sets beyond just geolocation) - there's still lots of value is making that accessible, easy to use and understand, and helping your customers get back to solving thier own problems while you worry about solving that piece for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on your definition of all, successful, and lucky. If you change successful to be defined as people like OP, I believe a large majority of successful people are extremely lucky. Probably over 99.9%. They owe their success to being extremely fortunate in a combination of many factors, not limited to: - Where they were born - Who their parents were - What food their parents gave them when they were kids - What o…
seems like a not useful definition. If we go with this what is not from luck? Someone works hard? That's because they got lucky with the right genes and upbringing. They're smart, born to the right parents. If we go with this then everything in life is a matter of luck.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they give you a loan Yes, they do, if you can provide a security for the loan. More often than not, the founder is the guarantor, which sucks for them if the business fails. This is moderately founder friendly, to say the least.
In Germany, there's the option to have the government secure your loan towards the investment bank. For the founder, that means you get capital into your new company and only the company is legally liable for it, but not you personally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on what you mean by "small." MicroConf focuses on SaaS founders who are, or aspire to run, 7- or 8-figure companies. We do also provide early stage education, but with the idea of folks building ambitious startups, though no in the traditional Silicon Valley Unicorn sense.
Yeah for sure. Going from 0 to 7-8 figures is the aspiration for people who attend, and what you've built is a great resource for that growth. But the person we're responding to has already achieved that aspiration. What's out there to serve the incremental growth of people who are looking to go from 7-8 to 9-10 figures? The feedback I've heard from people who've attended MicroConf multiple times tends to be that its…