181–190 of 339 posts
So good to see some actual Startup News on here. I miss the old days of this site when things were more optimistic and less click-bait.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't know that it is profit-generating, since the author doesn't take a salary. As for the assumption that the profit would be soaked up by the market salary for the founder, the fact that he's a former Google engineer or whatever is a pretty decent indication that this is true. I would agree that most people would take some job flexibility/autonomy in lieu of part of their bigco salary, but my guess is that this…
He did pay himself a salary in 2023. See the P&L included in TFA.
> I don’t draw a salary, so the total amount I earned from TinyPilot in 2023 was $236k
I assume the salary line is for other people's salary.
How big would that savings account need to be for these dividends to amount to something substantial to live off of?
Our business has a significant amount of cc spend because of ad networks that don't charge processing fees, and high CC limits acting as nearly free lines-of-credit. This generates something like ~$100k annually in points value for us.
We got some opinions from a few tax attorneys and CPAs a while back on how to handle this, and the consensus was clear that as long as points stay in the programs and are redeemed for flights/hotels/etc, they won't need to be recorded as rebate to expenses or as income.
Applying the rewards against your balance should be recorded as rebate against expenses rather than income. Also, worth noting that some cash back programs have started issuing 1099s, depending if it's a "Bonus" or percent of spend.
I think people (and the founder) are focusing on yearly profits as their remuneration and comparing it to a salary... but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits. In reality your net worth went up by over $1.5 million in the last year, in addition to earning 236k - t…
No way that 7, 15x is realistic. From my previous 2 startups none were sold for more than 4x. And these were healthy growing +10m businesses. I am not sure where you got those numbers from. I am curious.
Love this blog. Any other similar blogs or communities?
writing.billprin.com
I’m definitely a huge fan of mtlynch and was very inspired by his transparency especially around year 2 when he was pretty far in without much working.
I’d also recommend Jon Yongfook who bootstrapped an image generation api for social media marketing to 50k as well. Tony Dinh is also a must read. I actually have a notion database with a bunch of other bootstrapped bloggers but on the go at the moment.
For communities, Indie Hackers is the best known one, though there’s many others, Microconf, smallbets , etc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who is the buyer? Realistically, the best buyer would be someone who has deep connections in a market that the current owner hasn’t penetrated that could 5x the volume almost instantly. They would hem and haw about whatever small multiple the seller is asking for, and then laugh all the way to the bank after close. I’ve seen this happen many, many times. > And then, enough cash that it's worthwhile to go through di…
> Realistically, the best buyer would be someone who has deep connections in a market that the current owner hasn’t penetrated that could 5x the volume almost instantly. This is a nice theory. And it could be true, and it does happen, but it's more than likely not. You must be using better M&A brokerages/bankers than I ever have. None of them do actual diligence, they are selling the business...They are actively maki…
I’ve done it / do it with taking products and services to certain East Asian markets. And sometimes scaled quickly at much more than 5x of the original revenue.
> You must be using better M&A brokerages/bankers than I ever have.
FEI is one such broker, and know people on both sides of transactions done through them that are happy. I haven’t used them personally, but that’s one example.
They definitely do due diligence.
> With respect, are you actually buying businesses? Or just doing contracted technical DD? It feels like you are missing a good chunk of the picture here.
Funny, I was about to ask/say the same thing.
Yes, I buy businesses. No, I don’t do technical DD contract or otherwise (frankly, I’m not tech savvy enough to do that on my own — I can sniff out some bad code, but I let the pros do what they do).
I/we are on HN reply delay to prevent “flame wars”, even though I don’t think we are flaming. As such, I will stop here.
If you are what you actually say you are, I wish you luck and all the success in the world. That said, I stand by everything I have said above.
But, they don't appear to be useful in remote management. To the extent that this external device is necessary. Is that correct and/or why?
I think people (and the founder) are focusing on yearly profits as their remuneration and comparing it to a salary... but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits. In reality your net worth went up by over $1.5 million in the last year, in addition to earning 236k - t…
I think people (and the founder) are focusing on yearly profits as their remuneration and comparing it to a salary... but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits. In reality your net worth went up by over $1.5 million in the last year, in addition to earning 236k - t…
No way that 7, 15x is realistic. From my previous 2 startups none were sold for more than 4x. And these were healthy growing +10m businesses. I am not sure where you got those numbers from. I am curious.