311–320 of 339 posts
TIL a $230k income is meager. Jokes aside, what am I misunderstanding here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings Only high-growth, high-margin businesses can get 7x+ earnings. Creating a sufficient level of growth to garner 7x valuation is very tough to do bootstrapped. --- EDIT: The only reason anyone gets a 10x etc valuation is because they're doubling+ year-over-year, and very likely they'll be 3x bigger in 18 months. So basically, that's a 3…
> Only high-growth, high-margin businesses can get 7x+ earnings Not really, the S&P 500's P/E multiple has historically been at around 15x and now is somewhere around 30x [0]. And with that, we're talking about large, mature businesses that are not growing super fast -- more like 6-7% annualized, post-inflation [1]. [0] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-a…
There is a lot confusion in this thread (sorry) over "earnings multiples" vs "revenue multiples."
On HN you will almost always see revenue multiple discussed.
> I don’t draw a salary, so the total amount I earned from TinyPilot in 2023 was $236k. People often wonder how I survived on the meager earnings of my first five bootstrapper years. TIL a $230k income is meager. Jokes aside, what am I misunderstanding here?
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.
Classic scaling problems. Most people aren’t entrepreneurs, most people are risk-averse, cynical big company worker drones. The worker drones have way more time to spend on hacker news, since any job at a big company is infinitely easier than being an entrepreneur. Hence why the comments on every Show HN post for the last 7+ years is dominated by low stakes nitpicks. The type of things you hear in big meetings at big…
For the first half of the decade, I used to drink the cool-aid too: rewriting components using the framework-of-the-day, stating my opinion on whatever I considered to be important on HN, Reddit... Resulting in a lot of stuff, but not in reasonable ARR.
A few years ago, after making lots of cliche mistakes, I had another rough period, resulting in me buying out my partner's half that I gave to him for free without any contingencies, and having to consult again to finance the buy-out.
After that I decided to take the leap for the third time, and took a deep dive myself into sales and GTM, resulting in what I consider a ramen profitable ARR right now for someone with a family of four with a working spouse (little over 100K€ ARR).
I'm now slowly and steadily growing, but reinvesting almost everything I make back into it.
My next big learning step will be figuring out at least one repeatable way to get new clients.
I'm still in dubio whether I should do proper marketing, or just hire 2 SDRs and hand them a list with contacts...
I am very picky on my customers, so they tend to be very sticky, and buy extra modules as they renew their licenses, so I'm quite happy with how everything is evolving...
However, the whole thing takes time, a lot of time, and it requires a lot of grit and patience. So while it might sound interesting in a short comment on HN, it's basically just grinding every day, throwing things up to a wall, and seeing what sticks... If I'd blog about this every week, it would probably be really boring.
It might take 2, 3, 5 or 10 years to get to € 1M ARR, or maybe I'll never get to this amount, but I'm ok with that. I have friends who got investors, sold or were acqui-hired, and to me they seemed not to be happier at all during the job. And while it's nice to get FU money, I'm not sure that I'm willing to exchange years of my life for it, as i'm currently mostly enjoying myself and building the kind of company that I would love to work for.
The reason I'm no longer posting on Reddit, HN and the likes, is that - all things considered - I already have too much things on my plate, and posting on social media is not the best use of my time.
I do keep skimming articles to get the big picture as a hobby, but skip most of the shiny new things (TM), and stopped contributing because the value-add for me is so low.
Highly relevant comic for me: https://xkcd.com/386/
I imagine there are many others that share a similar story.
> I had savings in index funds from years working in big tech, and those investments generated enough dividend income to sustain me. How big would that savings account need to be for these dividends to amount to something substantial to live off of?
Do a significant share of your sales happen on Amazon? If so, have you experimented with sending inventory into Amazon so they can do the fulfillment and you can get a Prime badge on your listings?
On top of being a successful founder and a great writer, Michael is also a uniquely nice and generous person. He was the second customer of my startup and, before paying, advised me to raise the price.
how did you source the metal enclosure? I'm interested in making my products look more "professional" but don't know how I'd go about it
It was quite an ordeal! Our hardware engineering partner subcontracted the design to a team of industrial designers they'd worked with in the past. We ordered prototypes of the design from both China and vendors in the US. The Chinese versions were better by leaps and bounds.[0] We iterated a few times from there and eventually landed on a design we liked and worked with the Chinese vendor to produce the first few th…
I tend to think of a prototype as a rough sketch. Unless of course they told me it was a demo to win the job.