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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

#51

Post by talldatethrow »

shooker435 wrote: post #41
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 pr…

How is healthcare tied to employment? Isn't it available to buy on the open market?

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#52

Post by ativzzz »

not-my-account wrote: post #47
robszumski wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I imagine the broker he used is fairly experienced and well compensated, so he'd have to learn a totally different profession from the ground up without any mentors or experienced people helping him, on top of continuing to run the business, which you can easily argue is worth $90k

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#53

Post by flawn »

makk wrote: post #42

“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.

Watch out for survivorship bias though, everybody might think that but a lot more still fail.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#54

Post by riku_iki »

talldatethrow wrote: post #51
shooker435 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

How is healthcare tied to employment? Isn't it available to buy on the open market?

I think it will be (much) more expensive, but I am not an expert.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#55

Post by ativzzz »

mtlynch wrote: post #2

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

> and we received pre-qualification for an SBA loan

What does this mean? How does this work? Shouldn't the buyer take out the loan? Or does it look something like

- tinypilot takes out 600k, which you pocket

- you transfer ownership

- tinypilot is in debt, not the buyer

?

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#56

Post by bruce511 »

not-my-account wrote: post #47
robszumski wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can learn a lot of information from books. What upu can't get from a book is experience.

In this case you have a seller with no experience, and ultimately a buyer with no experience. In either situation a broker is valuable. In the case of both its an enormously important moderator who can keep both parties on track to a successful conclusion.

Book learning in such cases only gets you so far.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#57

Post by scripper »

mtlynch wrote: post #6
scripper wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there, loved the post. What do you think is next for you? Would you do it all over? Thanks for all of the content!

Thanks for reading! > What do you think is next for you? Next is either an educational product or a SaaS business I can build either fully solo or with 1-2 teammates in customer support roles. > Would you do it all over? No, not knowing what I know now about how difficult it is to succeed in hardware. I'm grateful that TinyPilot worked, but there's definitely a reason why there are so few bootstrapped hardware compan…

Great to know, thanks so much for the info!

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#59

Post by mtlynch »

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?

Author here.

For me, the value of the broker was just someone to guide me through the whole process because I'd never done it before. It was good to have someone whose interests were pretty aligned with mine and who answered questions quickly and thoroughly without me having to pay by the hour.

Another big part of the value was finding the buyer, as I probably couldn't do that on my own. I could have thrown a hail mary and listed the business for sale on the TinyPilot website and my blog, but the person who ultimately acquired the business definitely wouldn't have found me that way.

Having gone through it, I would consider foregoing a broker in the future if I had some way of finding my own buyer, but I have no regrets about the broker for this sale.

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