31–40 of 72 posts
Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.
An exit is an exit. He made something, and sold it FOR PROFIT in 6 months, while being in college. Pretty impressive.
so every time I sell a site on flippa thats an exit now
Of course I'll be the first to admit that working on your own projects is much more fulfilling and interesting, but it does have opportunity costs just like everything else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
congratulations on your experience! It really is difficult to name a price, I would have ignored any offers below 10-15k but on the other hand you can now concentrate on a new project and for 6 months from 0 to sale is remarkable.
according to some people a quite common exit is between 12 and 24 months[1] of the net profit. Considering his expenses (1700$) and sales (2500$), and initially ignoring the licensing fee, he had 800$ profit for six months, so let's round it to 150$/month, 3500$ is 24months of this profits. If we want to consider the single licensing fee, let's say he licenses once a year, it's 1500+1800 = 3300$/year, and so 3500 is…
When talking about "exits", it might also be useful to keep in mind the amount of money you could've made while working a regular in the same period of time. Of course I'll be the first to admit that working on your own projects is much more fulfilling and interesting, but it does have opportunity costs just like everything else.
But I definitely agree that it's something to consider.
> 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.
Congratulations. Our stories are a lot alike. I created Feedback Army in 2008 (I continue to operate it though). One thing I liked about reading your story was the lessons learned part. For a novice entrepreneur there's a lot of value in shipping something, marketing it, providing customer service, and dealing with the whole process. You'll find it's a good springboard to what you do next. Best of luck.
Dude great to hear from you! I'd really love to talk some time if you're interested. Feedback Army is awesome and I think we might have some cool stuff to share. Couldn't find any contact info in your profile but my email is dshipper [at] gmail.
> 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.
> 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.
For the metrics did you ever set up Google Analytics? I typically tell everyone to just install that first thing, it can give you ballpark estimates for almost any basic metrics question with about 5 lines of JS on each page.
For EC2, I agree with PaulHoule that it's possible to save money if tuned properly, but the learning curve is steep. I know I've served 5 or 10 minor projects of a single mini reserve instance ($6 / mo) with no issues, but getting a sense for it requires a bit of work.