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DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

danshipper.com

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Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#11

Post by dshipper »

molsongolden wrote: post #9
dshipper wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks it really was - although I regret not spending as much time on it as I could have.

I basically ended up doing no marketing for DomainPolish whatsoever besides a few posts on my blog which were popular on HN. A few other people tried out the service and wrote popular blog posts as well. I think doing the thank you videos in the beginning was key because it gave people a huge incentive to tell their friends about the site.

I wish I had more to say on marketing but that's something that I'm working on a lot now for my new startup. Hopefully in 6 months I'll have some more lessons to share :)

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#12

Post by dshipper »

brico wrote: post #10
dshipper wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks! That's one part of the experience that I'm definitely upset at myself for. But I'd rather get the mistakes out of the way while the stakes are low right?

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#14

Post by jason_shah »

Congrats, Dan! Fully agreed that given how most projects land the entrepreneur (and/or the investors) in the red, the real achievement here is executing an idea and seeing it through the full lifecycle of a business, in this case, through to a sale. The learning experience will be invaluable when you exit your next company.

This was a great story to follow through Hacker News, and your candor, detail, and introspection are admirable and indicative of the success ahead.

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#16

Post by dshipper »

jason_shah wrote: post #14

Congrats, Dan! Fully agreed that given how most projects land the entrepreneur (and/or the investors) in the red, the real achievement here is executing an idea and seeing it through the full lifecycle of a business, in this case, through to a sale. The learning experience will be invaluable when you exit your next company. This was a great story to follow through Hacker News, and your candor, detail, and introspecti…

Thanks Jason I'm glad you enjoyed following the story. It's definitely not a huge exit but I'm happy to have turned a profit and there's more where that came from :)

Re: DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months

#19

Post by sdotsen »

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?

A couple of Linode instances would've been way cheaper IMO.
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