71–80 of 204 posts
I’m surprised at all the comments focusing on the negative here. I found the story inspiring: they bootstrapped a business, grew revenue, hired some people, and grew revenue further. The founder created value and captured some of that value. The fact that the business can no longer acquire new customers is sad, but it’s only a small part of the story. The founder’s 6 year journey is probably more interesting than wha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely this. If you’ve built something profitable on someone else’s land, get big and cash out as fast as you can. It’s unsustainable, you’re just doing an arbitrage play while it lasts. Do well fast so you optimize for more dice rolls in the future.
The author seems well aware of that though.
"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 was never so naive to believe that they’ll just let me go around forever, piggyback on their platform and reap most of the benefits. Even though what we were doing was not forbidden - it was clear that Shopify would disapprove of it.
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…
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…
There aren't a lot of hard numbers in the post, but it sounds like Checkout X grossed in the high 7-figure to low 8-figure range, in ~four years, while paying (not very many) Eastern European salaries. The founder alone probably came away with a few million dollars!
The author set up a business in what they knew was a gray area. 6 months later the ToS were updated to explicitly ban what they were doing, and they got an email that pretty clearly implied that they would need to make major changes but wouldn't be shut down right away, but the author chose to interpret silence as authorization to keep scaling. About 8 months later Shopify's COO told them explicitly that Shopify didn…
> I was never so naive to believe that they’ll just let me go around forever, piggyback on their platform and reap most of the benefits. Even though what we were doing was not forbidden - it was clear that Shopify would disapprove of it.
They made their money while they could. They are disappointed they couldn't keep going, but it doesn't seem like they feel "entitled" to continue.
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.
Just always keep in mind that, it's not forever and that you should preserve some of that piggybacked money for less risky endeavors. I think business that are mounted over a giant, whilst prone to be killed anytime, can be used for a quick buck[0] as part of a larger plan. In this case, the author was aware of that, but more fore-thinking would have helped.
For instance, I leverage Telegram bots to make some business, but I'm ready for such an scenario where Telegram, decides:
- To make its API paid.
- To copy the features of my bots into product features.
See what happened with Reddit's API. WordPress purchased WooCommerce and it became a happy story, but it could have gone wrong and become a horror story where the purchase could have not happened, and WordPress gone into destroy mode.
I tread lightly.
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[0]: Do not conflate "quick" with "easy" in this context. The faster, the harder it is.
Everything was so composed and professional until they got to that part. Whattttttttt?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, OP probably made $5-10M. I know founders with $100M exits that made less than that thanks to equity dilution.
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