Wow! Congratulations Courtland! I've followed IH from day zero and it's been such a great learning experience. Really happy for you man!
All the best at Stripe!
IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
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Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#32I bet the total acquisition price is less than Stripe would wind up paying a content agency for fees, placement, etc. over a couple of fiscal years for similar exposure. And they're getting all the goodwill & talent alongside of it as the cherry on top. Brilliant move @stripe and congrats to the founders.
Wouldnt that imply not so brilliant move for the founders? The way you've worded it, it sounds like the founders could have got a lot more?
Could the site have continued to grow massively month over month for the next few years? If so, the founder probably would have earned more money independently. The HN audience is large, but it's not infinite, so growth could have stalled at some point. That's risk and reward; who knows? And who knows if maximizing profit was even his sole goal. Perhaps it was exposure, or building a real community to help folks start new businesses. Wherever the site was headed independently, I'm willing to bet Stripe can accelerate the process significantly, and that counts for a lot.
Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#33While going from a blog-to-acquisition in less than a year is an impressive feat, there have been suspicious circumstances around IndieHackers submissions to Hacker News including clickbait titles that are frequently fixed by HN mods, and in one case, explicit voting manipulation with an attempt to bypass the voting ring detector via linking to /newest: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg This acquisition sends a disappoi…
What's the problem with linking to /newest? I'm new to spam and abuse on HN
There isn't a legitimate reason to link to /newest unless it's to promote your submission, which in itself is against the HN rules. (there is the belief that people who vote in a submission via /newest do not trip voting ring detectors like that of direct links, but that is false)
Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#34Patrick from Stripe here. I wanted to quickly chime in to emphasize that our goal in acquiring Indie Hackers is to simply ensure that the site becomes as successful as possible. The Stripe upside we're hoping for is that more companies get started and that they're more successful . We already see a very large fraction of new internet companies choose Stripe; we're mainly hoping that Indie Hackers can help us grow the…
What do see on your acquisition list in 2017/2018?
It's very hard to know upfront -- what made us interested in Indie Hackers wasn't just the idea per se (we'd thought about it before and looked at other sites in the past), but rather the fact that it was executed so well. There are tons of things that we'd in principle be open to acquiring if the right company existed. In general, we look for small, highly-effective technical teams with a very high bar for execution quality. (Indie Hackers, which was pretty much just Courtland operating solo, cleared this threshold by a significant margin: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/851851923502268416) To the extent that the team really understands either developer tools or startups, that's a bonus.
Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#35Now indie hackers should be interviewed on indie hackers :O
Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#36Awesome, Looking forward to seeing what the deal was worth! Would be a real shame if this was hidden behind an NDA or what not.
I hope it is hidden. The site owner shouldn't have his/her finances broadcast on the internet. Friends come from the woodwork when they find out you just made $x million (not speaking from experience unfortunately).
Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#37Will you change the name to mainstreamhackers.com?
Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#38So in the spirit of what IH actually is, will the financial details be shared?
Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#39First of all, congrats to csallen, I have been following your journey from the day you launched on HN and it was fascinating to follow along. If you haven't read his month in review posts, highly recommended. I hope it's not taboo to speculate on the acquisition price, so here's my take : * extrapolating a $5k/month revenue to a year = $60k/year * acquisition price is roughly 2-4x yearly revenue so $120k to $240k * P…
Your numbers are low. They didn't buy a suburban lawn care business. I'd ballpark >$1m up front and >$250k annual comp with upside going forward, in some mix of cash and stock. Great move by Stripe. Congrats to Courtland for the exit and what seems like a win-win for both parties.
I'm not so sure. I haven't seen the higher big ticket multiples scale down to smaller businesses very well (only in the small biz media negotiations I've been involved in or tipped off about - so I am no expert!). I'd certainly take a 16x revenue multiple any day of the week though :-D
Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe
#40While going from a blog-to-acquisition in less than a year is an impressive feat, there have been suspicious circumstances around IndieHackers submissions to Hacker News including clickbait titles that are frequently fixed by HN mods, and in one case, explicit voting manipulation with an attempt to bypass the voting ring detector via linking to /newest: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg This acquisition sends a disappoi…
The HN community has been a big part of Indie Hackers, even helping me come up with the idea for the site in the first place.
I've made a ton of submissions in the past 8 months and experimented with various combinations of stories/titles that the HN audience might like, without always being successful. (Probably one out of every 4-5 submissions turned into an angry mob haha)
To speak specifically to your point about the titles, an essential element of Indie Hackers is that I require companies to share revenue numbers, because it really adds context to their stories (although it is certainly clickbaity, too). The mods actually okay'd me adding revenue numbers to submission titles[1], but I've mostly avoided it with recent submissions.