In this thread: lots of people who have never started a business giving advice to a guy who was making 600k/mo about why his business was dumb. Hacker News at its best.
Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
191–200 of 204 posts
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#192I'm not a business expert or an entrepreneur, but I've been around this industry long enough to know: Unless your intention is to flip your startup into an acquisition, I would recommend against plays like this. Specifically, tying yourself up to a closed ecosystem by building what amounts to a (albeit very nice and powerful) super-feature. I am saying this because I work for a large-ish company where someone did thi…
It can work the other way around too. Early in my career I was working for a company that provided value added services in the telecommunications space. We grew quite large, working with household name brands in Northern Europe. However everything we did went through a single third party provider - we didn't communicate directly with telecommunications companies. This provider did an ok job, however at the volumes we…
These revenge stories may sound nice but the sad thing is that people are so petty to begin with.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reads like a success story, I'm not sure your advice hits the target.
How does it read like a success story? The bottom half of the article is all about how Shopify pulled the rug out from under them by giving them 3 days to tell their users about "breaking ToS", locking them out of their app, and ultimately seizing their account.
The 600k monthly recurrent revenue makes it look like a very successful story
Launching a product in a walled garden, getting around 10 million recurrent revenue with a small team and almost no other fees, then stopping after a few years looks to me like a dream come true. Almost better than not having the pull rugged. Once you have that much money it's time and a stress-free life that I would seek.
The article reads a bit weird to me because there's a lot of complaining about Shopify including in the title, yet they also mention that they knew this would be the outcome from the beginning.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#194When you expand on something core to another company's platform, that is sometimes referred to as "picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer."
600k per month in a country where the average salary is reportedly about $8k per year (Georgia) isn't terrible, especially for such a small team. Getting in about 75 local yearly wages of recurring revenue per month is definitely worth the risk!
Slight correction, the article seems to indicate they are based in Bulgaria and their employees are remote from several other countries (including Georgia, but also e.g. the UK).
Not that it takes away from your point, it still sounds like a great success to me.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand how Shopify can maintain market dominance as just a middleman value extractor. Probably why they’re forcing their app. I deleted my account and haven’t used Shopify since they wouldn’t let me get my order tracking any way besides the app. As someone who worked adjacent to logistics it was just the hardest hard “no” of all time for me. Money moves to easily now days to build a monopoly on e-commerce…
Value extractor? I'm a non tech guy so I have a different perspective. I started a side business selling online. I have no idea where I would even start on my own, between setting up a website and handling payments etc. Shopify allowed me to literally stand up an ecommerce platform in an afternoon, and soon enough I was accepting $6k per month. The cost was something like $39/month, which was phenomenal value for mon…
If you don't mind my asking, what do you sell with your side venture that let you reach those numbers fairly soon?
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#196I'm not a business expert or an entrepreneur, but I've been around this industry long enough to know: Unless your intention is to flip your startup into an acquisition, I would recommend against plays like this. Specifically, tying yourself up to a closed ecosystem by building what amounts to a (albeit very nice and powerful) super-feature. I am saying this because I work for a large-ish company where someone did thi…
> Specifically, tying yourself up to a closed ecosystem by building what amounts to a (albeit very nice and powerful) super-feature. Couldn't agree more. It goes something like this : "What do you offer ?" "Feature X on top of Y" "What stops Y from doing it themselves ?" Either A "Well it's not worth it" (then why do you do it), or B "Well, they haven't so far ..." in which case you have an end date already, you just…
The guy made millions of dollars. I'd say it was very worthwhile for him.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#197The author set up a business in what they knew was a gray area. 6 months later the ToS were updated to explicitly ban what they were doing, and they got an email that pretty clearly implied that they would need to make major changes but wouldn't be shut down right away, but the author chose to interpret silence as authorization to keep scaling. About 8 months later Shopify's COO told them explicitly that Shopify didn…
Is the author looking for sympathy? I didn't get that from the article, just a post mortem of the company and what happened.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This guy made literally (tens of?) millions of dollars in revenue from his software While living in Bulgaria
And so what? That's still a lot. Who's making that mind of money there? He even started investing in smaller businesses.
I think you’re misunderstanding.
That’s a staggering amount of money in this context.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#199I’m surprised at all the comments focusing on the negative here. I found the story inspiring: they bootstrapped a business, grew revenue, hired some people, and grew revenue further. The founder created value and captured some of that value. The fact that the business can no longer acquire new customers is sad, but it’s only a small part of the story. The founder’s 6 year journey is probably more interesting than wha…
Yeah, the story isn't one of those "THIS IS SO UNFAAAAAAIR" things. It's just a description of what happened. Depending on the costs, 600,000 euros a month is pretty good even if it doesn't last forever. > If I sound bitter - I’m not. I like Shopify. I own Shopify stock. I believe they’re completely dominating the e-commerce platform space and none of their current competitors stand a chance of catching up. I know th…
> Depending on the costs, 600,000 euros a month is pretty good even if it doesn't last forever.
What? 600k euro per MONTH is like you can retire forever in one year. That would be 7mm euro. More than like what most people make during their entire life.
But of course they probably made that in revenue, not profit. Still, I bet they are in a pretty good spot to create a new product, company, etc and with a nice cash reserve if they want to retire.
Btw, according to the article they still keep their old customers, so not like the service has being completely shut down. It's just that they can't take new customers, so at some point they should have pretty low revenue, but maybe they still have a fair amount per month like 100~200k with a super reduced team.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#200"honestly, I don’t have the balls to pick a legal fight with a multi-billion corporation. On top of that, I believe that crying to the regulator is a bitch move."
So somewhere between balls-less and a bitch. Mmkay.