Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

leteyski.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 204 posts

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#51

Post by jasonlotito »

nolok wrote: post #6

"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.

"I decided to misrepresent what the article said and respond to some strawman to make myself seem smart."

I agree with you.

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#53

Post by adwn »

HWR_14 wrote: post #24
spamizbad wrote: post #3

I'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.

If it was much higher than what they ultimately spent on reproducing the product, then yes, "insanely high amount" might actually be an appropriate assessment.

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#54

Post by appplication »

shopify_throw wrote: post #39
brianwawok wrote: post #19

Well, I can relate as I just got an email that Shopify changed their partner TOS today because of me. They had demanded that I add a negative keyword "Shopify" to all of my Google ads. I declined, because - it wasn't in our partnership agreement and I in fact DID want clients who used Shopify to find my business. (I am in the e-commerce space selling a product that works for many marketplaces including Shopify). Just…

This has been the case for years. You weren’t allowed to bid on any search terms related to Shopify on Google Ads. Lots of Partners did though.

Pretty scummy practice. Not only does it drive out competition/innovation, it effectively reduces the cost of Shopify’s ad buy.

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#55

Post by zengid »

nolok wrote: post #6

"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.

I feel like this applies to iOS apps too

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#56

Post by monsieurbanana »

satvikpendem wrote: post #31

How many times are we going to hear the same old story warning of platform risk? It happened with Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Stripe, and so many others. If you want to control your company, don't build off someone else's infrastructure, make your own, even if it's harder to do so.

This reads like a success story, I'm not sure your advice hits the target.

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#57

Post by sneak »

dgb23 wrote: post #35

Aside: Why isn't there a payment protocol standard that's implemented in browsers?

Because the browser manufacturers have their own centralized payment protocols (Google Pay, Apple Pay) that they would prefer you use so that they can surveil your habits and get a cut of the fees.

Apple Pay is definitely integrated into Safari.

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#58

Post by mindcrime »

wongarsu wrote: post #46
chefandy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

It can still be a great business strategy, as long as you're aware of exactly the points you outlined. You just can't run a normal startup strategy of subsidized growth, instead you have to rush through the product lifecycle towards cash cow status and make hay while the sun is shining. Once $bigcorp kills your business by implementing their backlog you pivot to something else, with the advantage of already having a…

It's rarely the case that there's only room for one player in a given market. Market segmentation is a real thing, for good reasons. If $BIGCO pivots to producing a product similar to yours, that doesn't have to mean "the end". I'd suggest everybody read The Discipline of Market Leaders for more on how to choose among different strategies and position yourself vis-a-vis competitors.

Of course the problem of fundamentally building on someone else's platform remains. This is why it's a good idea to start at least thinking about how to move your business onto another platform, from day zero. Of course there's a balance between investing time and money in building abstraction layers and evaluating other platforms and doing these different things, versus spending that time and money on immediate growth. But if one invests literally 0 in this situation, they can hardly expect much sympathy if the underlying platform gets yanked out from underneath them and kills their business.

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#59

Post by appplication »

jeroenhd wrote: post #25
eYrKEC2 wrote: post #7

When 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!

Agree 100%. People here are missing the forest for the trees. The creator made way more doing this than he could being employed at even the highest levels in tech, and pulled in huge income with way shorter time frame and less risk than taking VC money and having to exit via acquisition or IPO.

Sure, they got steamrolled in the end, but it’s an absolute win by any metric.

Re: Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

#60

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #47
nolok wrote: post #6

"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 worse than that—within 6 months of them starting to operate Shopify updated the ToS to make it clear that the app they already knew was a grey area was actually formally banned. They received an email that said they wouldn't be shut down right away, which the author took to mean "carry on!" Then Shopify's COO called them personally to tell them to knock it off, and they used a technicality in the phrasing of the…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN