Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

mtlynch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 329 posts

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#61

Post by tills13 »

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…

Holy hell the pessimism in this thread over a life-changing amount of money for 99% of people.

> should have stayed at Google

You should feel privileged that you've never been "stuck" at a job that you don't find personally interesting and stimulating. Wasting your life to see the number in your bank account increase.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#62

Post by mtlynch »

ativzzz wrote: post #55
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 ?

Thanks for reading!

Yes, you're correct. The buyer takes out the loan. This was an asset sale, so assets transferred over but not any debts.

The seller (me) can approach a loan broker and show their financials, and the loan broker can say, "I think it's likely that the SBA would approve this loan, and I can connect you with lenders I think would offer the SBA loan for acquiring this business."

The SBA pre-qualification isn't binding or official, but I guess the loan broker's prediction is accurate enough that the brokerage will list businesses as SBA pre-qualified based on the loan broker's assessment.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#63

Post by mtlynch »

everial wrote: post #45
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).

Thanks so much! Yes, I'm definitely planning to spend less time on work over the coming years.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#64

Post by ajford »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #58

He would make a lot more money by staying at Google. If it's not about money, I would understand. But then why sell a growing business?

There's an entire section titled `Why Sell`.

> I missed writing code....

and

> My wife and I also wanted to start a family. TinyPilot only occupied about 20% of my time, but it occupied 90% of my stress. I would have done a terrible job juggling founder stress with new parent stress.

Changes in life circumstances changed his priorities. It wouldn't be the first or last person I've heard of that wanted to go back to coding after ending up in mgmt/founding something.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#66

Post by gwd »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #58

He would make a lot more money by staying at Google. If it's not about money, I would understand. But then why sell a growing business?

It sounded like it wasn't really the kind of business he wanted to be in. What do you do if you've poured two years of your life into something, and it's starting to be profitable, but you realize it's not really your thing? Options are:

1. Press on making OK money doing something you're not that enthusiastic about

2. Just pull the plug

3. Sell it

I mean, obviously #3 is the least bad of all the options. You don't know what something's going to be like until you try it. This is a "negative result" from the "what kind of business do I want to run", but now he has a better idea what might not work for him. It's probably a break-even result from a financial perspective, and a positive result from an experience gained perspective.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#68

Post by j45 »

flawn wrote: post #53
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.

The issue is too many startups can be solutions in search of a problem.

It's not uncommon to become attached to something.

I've done a lot of B2B tooling and the percentage and risk of failure goes down significantly if you are ruthlessly focused on only solving problems that cost time or money for a business, and being flexible to pivot.

In the B2B space, there are absolutely 100% instant revenue generating needs and solutions. I'm packaging a rather boring one right now. Getting out of the building before writing any code, what so ever is critical.

Building before learning is the cart before the horse and limits shelf life, runway, and ability to learn. One could easily cowboy code or over architect something that prevents you from trying the very thing that will take off because it's too difficult to now implement in your formerly simple codebase of patch work that is now too complex.

They often can get discovered while doing a bout of consulting (aka paid market research and customer discovery), or solving one problem sheds a light on something near by that look subtle but critical and a no brainer.

My personal experience has been people will actually say the phrase "I'm trying to find a way to give you money to use this" when you may show them a prototype. This didn't seem like it actually happened, until it did.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#69

Post by mtlynch »

duckmysick wrote: post #18
mtlynch wrote: post #2

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

Well done on the sale and congratulations to you and your wife. Best of luck to both of you. I have a question about this part: > I’d also risk TinyPilot’s sales slipping after so many months being distracted from the business. What was the time split between the sale process and running day-to-day operations? I know bigger companies have dedicated teams for that, but I'm curious how does it look like in smaller ones…

Thanks for reading!

>What was the time split between the sale process and running day-to-day operations? I know bigger companies have dedicated teams for that, but I'm curious how does it look like in smaller ones.

It varied from week to week, but I was spending 10-25 hours per week on the sale for about five months.

But beyond wall time, the time I spent on the sale was often much more stressful than anything else and left me mentally drained for anything else. The sale involved preparing reports that I'd never created before, and it was extremely important for me not to make any mistakes because I didn't want the buyer to think I'd provided fraudulent information.

I also had to focus much more on short-term results than normal. Part of this was a lack of time to oversee complex projects, but the other part was that it's to my detriment to invest in something that pays off in six months if I sell the company at month three. But I can't run that way forever, so I knew if I tried to run the company like that indefinitely, I'd pay the penalty for always focusing on the short-term at the expense of long-term.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#70

Post by j45 »

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…

Money is time, and time that is free to choose is more freedom to spend your time how you please, and work on things that may not need to have a financial half.
Post reply on HN