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I sold Baremetrics

baremetrics.com

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Re: I sold Baremetrics

#201

Post by ineedasername »

vbsteven wrote: post #127
elric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Belgian, I can't help but look at these numbers in disbelief. 100-200k/annum for churning out code 40 hours a week? Where do I sign up for this? I'm the best paid employee I know, work insane hours, and I'm not even in that bracket. Addendum: it's very rare to make more than twice the average wage in Belgium as an employee. It's a different matter if you're self employed.

As a Belgian myself: self-employment is the key here. It's not that hard to pull in 100-200K annually in the current belgian tech space, I've done it consistently for the past 5 years, with lots of periods where I did not work full time.

In the US at least, as a contractor, you have to make a lot more in gross pay to come out equivalent to what you'd earn at a lower salary somewhere else. You have to cover:

* Health Insurance

* No paid time off: Want 4 weeks off a year? That's a 7.6% reduction in pay.

* You have to pay both the employee & employer side of payroll taxes

* You're not eligible for unemployment, so you need to save more money to cover that possibility

* No retirement fund so you don't get any matching funds and have to really be on top of what your long term needs are and take that off the top of your income.

As an example, I have a normal salary full-time job, but I also have a hobby business on the side. The money I make from that given the tax bracket I'm in, federal, state, payroll taxes, means my "take home" pay from is taxed around 43%. And that's without needing to take anything extra out of it for paid time off, health insurance, or retirement, all of which are well covered by my salaried position.

Re: I sold Baremetrics

#202

Post by anonfornoreason »

falcolas wrote: post #165
intev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a sense of entitlement here that's not sitting well with me. Don't get me wrong, I think employees of a "startup" deserve to get some sort of payout during a liquidation event, but I think that payout should be directly proportional to how much risk was assumed. Did they take a full standard salary? (Doesn't have to be SV 100k+ salaries, but standard for whatever is paid in their area). Did they do more than…

There's a vast difference between a butcher in a meat processing facility and a trained professional software developer who is responsible for creating/supporting/etc your software. As for entitlement, what entitles a founder to get ~50x the payout of their employees? Especially when they're also taking a SV level salary (not living in SV) and spending VC money.

If you don't like it, become a founder yourself. For better or worse, the reality is that maybe 5% of developers out there have the stamina, the ingenuity, and the risk tolerance to build a business. Speaking anonymously, as a person who started a business ~12 years ago that employs 17 people. The stuff you have to deal with non stop as a founder who is developing product, working on HR, working on code, working on infrastructure, working on the career growth of your employees, all the while also engineering a business that can in theory run itself without continuous micro-management, is insane. Not a single one of our employees, even our high producing hustlers, do half what my founder and I do on a weekly basis. You have to be a master of everything, because the moment you aren't the lead expert in the room, someone gets you off the rails. Running a small software based business producing a customer facing product is insane.

Add to it the last four years of "culture" growth leading all west coast tech workers to demand you add 10% overhead to your business to advance diversity, equity, and inclusivity, which in reality is just advocation for the right kind of politics to be brought into company culture, and you get a crazy stressful soup for any founder.

Re: I sold Baremetrics

#203

Post by aliston »

intev wrote: post #115
falcolas wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And without “the help”, most founders (OP included) won’t make it to the sale. You can’t scale without “the help”. You can’t grow your market without “the help”. To badly paraphrase someone: “The idea isn’t what’s valuable, the implementation is.” That implementation is probably >90% thanks to “the help”.

There's a sense of entitlement here that's not sitting well with me. Don't get me wrong, I think employees of a "startup" deserve to get some sort of payout during a liquidation event, but I think that payout should be directly proportional to how much risk was assumed. Did they take a full standard salary? (Doesn't have to be SV 100k+ salaries, but standard for whatever is paid in their area). Did they do more than…

The point is not that founders don't take on more risk than employees. It's that that software engineers fresh out of college are not good at evaluating risk adjusted returns. If they were, they'd realize that the current market rate for joining a startup is a bad deal, thereby forcing startups to up their equity compensation. Many a starry eyed new grad has been lured by tales of riches from a startup founder / snake oil salesman.

Re: I sold Baremetrics

#204

Post by Aperocky »

mooreds wrote: post #113
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not making any other assumptions here, but I think this is a great example of something that's become more and more obvious to HNers over the past few years: from a financial perspective, if you have an opportunity to join a FAANG vs a startup, it pretty much almost always makes financial sense (usually much more sense) to join the FAANG. And since it usually makes a LOT more financial sense, it can often make a lot…

> Of course, not everyone can get an offer at a FAANG Note that this is true for many reasons, not all of which are related to technical ability. Not everyone should try to get a FAANG job, either. Factors candidates may consider: * how much time they want to spend interviewing/prepping * what their previous experience has been * where they went to school * where they are willing to live * what type of work they like…

I think it really depends on where in FAANG, or even in the same company.

My experience in the one of them has been the opposite of what some of the bullet points implies, or at least in a 'positive' direction.

Re: I sold Baremetrics

#205

Post by jcims »

user5994461 wrote: post #178
jcims wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happens with GitLab somewhat regularly. I don't know of any company that operates with that level of transparency and somehow a select set of folks can't seem to control themselves when supplied with a reason to air their grievance.

GitLab is a poster child of why companies don't publish any details. Deleted the production database and customer data? You could apologize and move on. There should have been backups to restore from but clearly there weren't. The gitlab way: Go in great details about how there is no automated backup and the last one that was done manually 3 months ago doesn't work... and how there was no testing/staging environment…

That's definitely the pragmatic view and the obvious downsides are largely why this approach is so rare.

Much like TFA I think there are things to be learned from that level of transparency and hope the experiments continue.

Re: I sold Baremetrics

#207

Post by mikeg8 »

xyst wrote: post #93

Interesting "journey", but as I was reading I can't get over how similar this site looks to Stripe's old UI. From the color scheme to the icons for each product in the menu bar, it's almost a 1:1 copy.

Originally (we used Barmetrics in 2014-15), it was marketed as more of an analytics tool for Stripe. I think designing to mirror strip was intentional early on, and worked well enough to not change over the years.

Re: I sold Baremetrics

#208

Post by Aperocky »

JackFr wrote: post #91
alextheparrot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good faith decisions go a long way, if they believe in the founder that 800k becomes an investment to be front-of-line for his next company. The economics make sense insofar as that sum isn’t going to move the fund’s returns a whole lot.

> Good faith decisions go a long way, if they believe in the founder that 800k becomes an investment to be front-of-line for his next company. Or its the cost of a lesson to stay away.

He did plan to retire so I don't think he would have needed them. It's more of a see you never type of situation.

Re: I sold Baremetrics

#209

Post by spatx »

skrebbel wrote: post #97

At the time I write this comment, half my screen is full of people calling Josh not so nice things. Folks, this is a founder who's openly sharing the kinds of things we usually keep hidden. I doubt there's been a startup exit in the last decade where a healthy skeptical HN'er couldn't find some wrongs being done, if the details had been available. It's extremely hard to get everything right, from every perspective. T…

I agree, I'd like to see more posts like these. While I'm impressed by the unicorn startup stories, I want to also hear from those that did/could not take that path, which is a majority of the startups. One of the most impressive things is that Josh did all of this with a level of transparency few founders would be willing to.

Of course, some posters here are talking about employees getting a raw deal, but it was there for all to see that the company had decided long back to prioritize profit more than growth. Any employee that would have expected a unicorn like exit would have known it wouldn't be the case and would have left long ago. Blaming Josh for that doesn't feel right to me.

Re: I sold Baremetrics

#210

Post by caffeine »

t0astbread wrote: post #188
caffeine wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you making moral judgements on a business decision? The investors didn't HAVE to take a write down, they chose to. The early employees didn't HAVE to join this company, they chose to. Why do you deem it immoral for a founder to do what is best for himself within the bounds of the agreements he has made? This kind of calling-out is common in HN and quite distasteful. Comments like this all amount to saying "X…

Can you elaborate how charity is not a moral good?

In this case, charity would distort incentives by softening the outcome of bad decision-making.

Each of those employees signed up for a salary and equity.

That equity turned out to be of very little value to them in the end, probably less than they were hoping for.

If they all got paid out anyway, they would not have learned that small equity stakes can turn out meaningless, and that exits are way less profitable for employees then founders.

Some of these employees might now go on to be founders because they learned the dangers of working hard on something in which there is no equity. In the end they might create something of massive value, which the world never would have had if they simply benefited from charity.

I think the lesson of this exit is also more valuable for all HN readers than it would've been if he had just paid out the employees, for the same reasons.

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