161–170 of 329 posts
2) Congrats on expecting.
3) Thank you for sharing. I found this insightful, and hopefully throughout the journey you found more fulfillment than you would have had you stayed working at Google making software for such amazing product manager decisions like a $240 smart watch for 8 year olds...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife runs her own consulting business, I’m taking a break from tech work. This means we buy insurance on the federal marketplace (healthcare.gov). It is expensive, but not insanely so. Family of four, living in Oregon, non-smoking, our premium is ~$1k/month. Granted it’s a high deductible ($12k), but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic emergency that could wipe out our savings. We are fortunate to not hav…
> Family of four, living in Oregon, non-smoking, our premium is ~$1k/month. Granted it’s a high deductible ($12k), but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic emergency that could wipe out our savings. We are fortunate to not have expensive, ongoing conditions. Family of two, living in the EU, non-smoking, our premium is ~€0/month. Granted it's a €0 deductible, but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic em…
The enshittification begins. Fork this repo now! https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot
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…
It also appears you haven’t met anyone truly wealthy, because I can tell you they don’t share your point of view
> 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. I feel this. Being a founder is hard, and raising kids is very hard. I was a little bit sad when I saw this headline show up on HN, because I've been following you for years, ever since the beginning. I always ad…
>Would you build another hardware business, or are you going to try for a software business next?
No, I don't think I'd try hardware again.
It's a shame because I learned so much about hardware and selling a physical product, so I do have an edge if I wanted to do something else that involves both hardware and software, but bootstrapping hardware from zero is just so risky. I caught a lot of lucky breaks for it to work out with TinyPilot; but simple one-time events like a manufacturing error or a lost shipments could have sunk the entire company in the first two years.
I'd like to try another educational product. I released a blogging course at the end of 2020. I didn't have time to promote it much because TinyPilot swallowed all my time, but it still has made $10k of profit. I'd like to try something like that again.
But I would also like to build some kind of pure software business if I land on the right idea and the right market for it.
I also own a small bootstrapped company (pure software), and I am now on year 21 (!). Someday, my business will run its course. When it does, I will probably write a blog post about the entire experience of starting and owning it, and if I do I will have been inspired by your posts.
Best wishes.
"When you sell a business at TinyPilot’s scale, there’s no deposit. You can invest hundreds of hours into preparing reports for due diligence, reveal all your confidential business secrets, and spend thousands of dollars negotiating legal documents and still walk away with nothing if the buyer backs out." Great write up overall but as someone who has bought a couple of businesses, it is not just the seller who loses…
Yes, definitely agree. I didn't mean to say that the buyer has no skin in the game, just that the seller receives no compensation if the buyer pulls out of the deal. In this case, the buyer probably spent more on the deal than I did, but that wouldn't really comfort me if they had backed out last minute.
Author here. I'm happy to answer any questions about this post, the sale process, or my time running TinyPilot.
Congratulations on the sale. Thanks for including real numbers, that will be helpful if I ever sell one of my products.