Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

danshipper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 72 posts

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#3

Post by dshipper »

suking wrote: post #2

Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.

Thanks! I guess to me, more important than the selling price, was the process as a whole. It's a product that I took from an idea, built out and eventually sold. In there were a lot of lessons that I thought might be interesting to people.

$3,500 might not be a lot to you. And obviously it's not enough to go away on. But it does mean that I can work full-time on my startup this summer.

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#6

Post by dshipper »

sandis wrote: post #4

> I set up 3 instances (two production and one staging) and thought I was a boss. [..] Lesson learned: don't use anything but Heroku until you have to. Did he really need 3 instances? Or even a separate staging environment?

Thanks for the comment! Obviously 3 instances were too much. But the point remains that if you're running a low traffic Rails app it's a lot cheaper (free) to host on Heroku than it is on EC2. And if you're running at the scale that DomainPolish was that makes all the difference in terms of take home profit.

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#8

Post by dshipper »

iambot wrote: post #5

Congrats on the 'exit', and on all you learnt from it. Looking at your stats at the bottom of the post, what exactly is meant by 'Fee to License'?

So I ended up licensing the codebase to someone else so he could build a different Mechanical Turk app. I kept all the IP but he got the codebase to use. Thanks for asking I'll try and make that more clear in the post!

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#9

Post by molsongolden »

dshipper wrote: post #3
suking wrote: post #2

Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.

Thanks! I guess to me, more important than the selling price, was the process as a whole. It's a product that I took from an idea, built out and eventually sold. In there were a lot of lessons that I thought might be interesting to people. $3,500 might not be a lot to you. And obviously it's not enough to go away on. But it does mean that I can work full-time on my startup this summer.

I thought the post was great. $3,500 is better than the $0 that most people get for their side projects.

Congratulations on the sale and it sounds like it was a great learning experience.

edit: If you don't mind sharing, how did you end up finding the people who were developing their own sites? The post mentions customer engagement but not how you found them in the first place.

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#10

Post by brico »

dshipper wrote: post #3
suking wrote: post #2

Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.

Thanks! I guess to me, more important than the selling price, was the process as a whole. It's a product that I took from an idea, built out and eventually sold. In there were a lot of lessons that I thought might be interesting to people. $3,500 might not be a lot to you. And obviously it's not enough to go away on. But it does mean that I can work full-time on my startup this summer.

congratulations on your experience!

It really is difficult to name a price, I would have ignored any offers below 10-15k but on the other hand you can now concentrate on a new project and for 6 months from 0 to sale is remarkable.

Post reply on HN