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Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#284

Post by sebastiennight »

paraschopra wrote: post #224
_1tem wrote: post #29

Wow, what an inspiring story? Care to share any stats, such as team size, when you hit your first ARR milestones, or anything else?

We hit our first million in 18 months when we were ~10 (I think). My first milestone was $1000 (my salary before starting Wingify). The first month I launched, made $4000 and it kept doubling from there for a while. I remember being glued to the customer and revenue chart for the first few years. I had even coded a small utility to make a small ka-ching sound on my laptop whenever we get a new customer :)

Ha ha, I had coded the same kind of utility in 2007 in my first business, to send me an SMS whenever there was a purchase. (and my phone was set up to go "ka-ching!" for SMSes from that number)

Turns out I had a bug in my code, and I got a text every time someone visited the page, which meant at the end of launch day I had lost money by paying more in SMS fees than I made in sales for the day!

Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#286

Post by dzonga »

congrats. for the things you achieved and the things you didn't do.

you could've given many reasons of not starting e.g i'm in India - I need to move to the US etc, I can't access capital, too young etc. there's a lot of competitors etc. but you took the plunge anyway and got handsomely rewarded for it.

congrats for your inspiring journey.

Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#287

Post by withinboredom »

vectoral wrote: post #271
shostack wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow marketer I've totally done similar stuff to send messages to whomever is digging through their utms. More usefully though, you can learn a shocking amount about a company from their utms and event data.

I haven't dug into this much--out of curiosity, what do you think are some of the most useful things you can learn?

Most importantly, you can often find out WHY a campaign exists with stuff like utm=small-biz.

If they’re a competitor, congrats, you just found a potential niche you may have overlooked. If you look at what events they send to their analytics, you can uncover what they know and don’t know about app usage or ad performance.

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