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Comment by bitbotbit | Hacker News Reader

For context, we got into the situation we're in based on not having a strong understanding of the market/ unit economics from the get-go. It's taken heroic efforts from the team and a significantly large, complex technical product to be viable. Many lessons learned, not least to code less and do market/customer discovery straight-away.

Thanks for the feedback, your points are all valid.

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"If you've ran a business for 6 years and no one inside can run it, that's not very good."

"based on not having a strong understanding of the market/ unit economics from the get-go"

Dude, not strong understanding of market etc and other reasons given are not correlated to not having a person on the inside after 6 years who can run it...it probably means staff havn't been involved enough...

I guess that's part of a problem of bootstrapping, everything has to be pyramid structure even with only 6 employees? Never thought about that.

Not having a strong understanding of the market from the get-go and not having an employee to run the business after 6 years is correlated in the following sense:

Founders have a large amount of surface area to cover (office, accounting, insurance, payroll, legal, taxes, hiring, management, etc). If you are in a market that doesn't allow you to grow quickly enough to hire in a large enough team to cover these functions (plus the meat and potatoes of the actual product and customer requirements), you can be left stretched extremely thin. If founders are covering 15 different company functions, it hard to find someone who can handily take over.

Surely @ ~$18k p/mo in profit this can be figured out though, as in, outsource the cruft as much as feasible. That's far worth keeping a company in operation, imho.

Assuming the business won't simply shut down without the founders being full throttle on these sorts of tasks, it'll free up time for M&A.

Curious, why the urge to sell?

Thanks for the feedback. Namely, there's a number of other product ideas I think could be higher growth that I'd like to explore. Recently moved to SV from a fly-over state, and think may finally have the potential to leverage an SV network for mentorship/advice.

A lot of the feedback I've gotten from founders has broken down in the following sense: if the person has grown and sold a company before of >= 10M ARR, they typically say shut it down ASAP and move on. If the founder has never grown and sold a business before, they advise to keep it running.

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