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Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
21–30 of 204 posts
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#22A lot of bootstrappers start of this way. Hell even I started out this way.
But the golden rule is, you need to move away while the sun is shining. Reinvest profits elsewhere and start a business which doesn't depend on anybody else.
The current crop of people building on Open AI should also pay heed.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#23You made some bank. Be happy. Find the next opportunity to do the same.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#24I'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…
I feel fairly confident your "insanely high amount" wasn't as high as you feel it was.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#25When 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!
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#26"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.
It's not even like they were making some cool thing that just happened to only run on AWS or something. It's more like:
"We improved an important but comparatively small core feature of a huge, complex service built, owned, run, maintained, and constantly improved by one company. They probably had our whole business on a Trello card in their long-term project board from the moment we started. Then, out of nowhere, they just implemented it themselves!"
Business is hard, and I don't have the hubris to assume I can do any better than them, but that's why I don't try. I really feel for the folks that put their time, effort, and creativity into making something useful for people that didn't pan out... but this just seems really shortsighted.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#27"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.
You're even understating the case for this particular issue. I own a Shopify store, and one thing that I found out early on is that Shopify does not want you to mess with checkout. It is far and away the most limited piece of their application in terms of customization, and their help articles made it clear that it could not be changed. This app is built on top of a platform and doing something that the platform did…
Didn’t really seem like OP was asking for sympathy. Didn’t take outside money, fully bootstrapped, took his money and went home.
Good for him.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#28Hey, better be killed by Shopify then murdered by Meta/Microsoft/X with "Checkout X"
But yeah, should've gotten the MRR high and then shop it around and take a nice buyout. Some PM noticed, shopify noticed the MRR and decided they can implement it and take it for a ride.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#29I'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…
But at the same time, if you are bootstrapped, profitable and can iterate fast, building on top of an existing platform is a fantastic way to get customers. You have a captive audience, you can understand the market easily, and can launch products fast since the tech stack is already well defined.
Not every business has to be sold for $100M or be around forever. A well-run bootstrapped startup like the OP’s can make you millions if it survives just 3-4 years.
Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
#30The only logical move would've been to setup a Shopify competitor and making a new platform
I'm not familiar with Shopify but this was my first thought on what he should have been doing with the money. Even if he didn't actually achieve it, if he had made substantial headway in that direction then Shopify would have been well advised to buy him out rather then kill him and risk a major new competitor.
Still it sounds like a heroic tale and I this this guy is going to end up landing on his feet.