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I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

mtlynch.io

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Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#41

Post by shooker435 »

xyst wrote: post #35

Wild. I vaguely remember this founder spending an obscene amount of money on some boutique firm to give homepage a small update. Seems he exited the Google grind about 6 years ago. I guess salaries were between $180-250K during that time frame. Google grinder for 6 years: $1,080,000-$1,500,000 Entrepreneur: “$920k over four years (with sale)”, but doesn’t include the 2 bombs he had prior to successful exit. (None of…

This mindset assumes that the only measure of success is monetary. If he left Google to try and get richer than staying at Google, then sure, he probably lost.

However, he kept trying again before job hunting or returning to big tech. This tells me the monetary factor was smaller than something else.

You mention the underrated educational experience in your last sentence, but there's so much more than that. He was probably never worried about his autonomy, being laid off, working with (or for) people he didn't want to work with, corporate politics, or anything else corporate bureaucracy introduces. This likely freed up his brain to be more creative and actually be used to 100% of its capacity.

I believe the obsession with TC in tech is highly problematic and there are a lot of talented folks optimizing for promotions via internal politics, rather than solving real problems for real people.

I also wish healthcare wasn't tied to employment, but that's a post for another time.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#42

Post by makk »

“I immediately knew I was onto something.”

Every successful bootstrapper who I know personally says this.

The ultimate success didn’t happen instantly but the product/market fit was obvious on day one.

And they didn’t iterate their way to that point. They walked away from whatever they were doing before, restarted with a blank sheet a paper, and the new thing immediately resonated.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#43

Post by bittwiddle »

Thanks for sharing! I'm currently trying out a bootstrapped hw project myself, and have enjoyed following along with your progress.

You mentioned having trouble working with vendors, was this for ex: having boards assembled? I guess I've probably gotten "lucky" with relatively low scale so far, but been happy with the assorted online PCBA services.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#44

Post by robszumski »

xyst wrote: post #36
alberth wrote: post #34

Broker commission: $88,900 Legal fees: $18,297 This equates to ~18% of total sale price. Most people don't realize how much get eaten up in deal/closing costs. Congrats to him for the successful exit. Reading his blog post over the years should be eye opening to anyone just how hard starting/running a business is.

A broker is just a middleman between the seller and buyer. What’s the value add for sales like this?

The broker was advising him on price point, strategy and fielding the interested parties for further discussion. Pretty important for this type of transaction.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#45

Post by everial »

mtlynch wrote: post #2

Author here. I'm happy to answer any questions about this post, the sale process, or my time running TinyPilot.

Congrats on the upcoming little one! As someone who also had first infant late last year, consider dialing back your productivity expectations with a newborn (both because it's a wonderful time and because oh-heaven it's so much work).

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#46

Post by gigel82 »

This is interesting. Once manufacturing (and other tedium) was outsourced, I'd have thought that's "making it". More or less "passive income" presuming the employees took care of everything else. If the revenue truly was 208k, you'd just need to "hang in there" for 2.5 years and you'd make whatever you got in the sale, then everything else coming in later would be just "extra".

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#47

Post by not-my-account »

robszumski wrote: post #44
xyst wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A broker is just a middleman between the seller and buyer. What’s the value add for sales like this?

The broker was advising him on price point, strategy and fielding the interested parties for further discussion. Pretty important for this type of transaction.

How much of this can be learned by reading a couple books? I wonder how much higher profit he actually made compared to if one could self teach these skills.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#48

Post by talldatethrow »

xyst wrote: post #36
alberth wrote: post #34

Broker commission: $88,900 Legal fees: $18,297 This equates to ~18% of total sale price. Most people don't realize how much get eaten up in deal/closing costs. Congrats to him for the successful exit. Reading his blog post over the years should be eye opening to anyone just how hard starting/running a business is.

A broker is just a middleman between the seller and buyer. What’s the value add for sales like this?

If we trust the founder is smart enough to build a business worth x, he's smart enough to decide a fair commission for selling it.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#49

Post by ignoramous »

alberth wrote: post #34

Broker commission: $88,900 Legal fees: $18,297 This equates to ~18% of total sale price. Most people don't realize how much get eaten up in deal/closing costs. Congrats to him for the successful exit. Reading his blog post over the years should be eye opening to anyone just how hard starting/running a business is.

> how hard starting/running a business is

That it is, but here Michael is explicit that most of the pain [0] was from doing hardware, software, and e-commerce all at once. Surely, there are other relatively easier businesses in tech?

[0] Reminds me of Avery Pennarun's A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure (2012), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754531

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#50

Post by blehn »

xyst wrote: post #35

Wild. I vaguely remember this founder spending an obscene amount of money on some boutique firm to give homepage a small update. Seems he exited the Google grind about 6 years ago. I guess salaries were between $180-250K during that time frame. Google grinder for 6 years: $1,080,000-$1,500,000 Entrepreneur: “$920k over four years (with sale)”, but doesn’t include the 2 bombs he had prior to successful exit. (None of…

With promotions, equity, and stock price growth (+220% over the last 5 years), probably closer to 2 or 2.5M of Google income.
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