I’d like to give thanks to all the people here on Hacker News who supported the project during that launch and any questions or comments just let me know!
The short version (summarized from the article): I spent 2 months building an app to detect trends. Launched as a Show HN and reached #1 on Hacker News (briefly!). Another 4 months growing and improving it but failed to monetize. But I got enough traction to get acquired by Brian Dean founder of Backlinko.
On the other hand I was talking to a founder last week about acquiring his company. he is doing about 1M in revenue and was asking about 600K. I dont think we can close before the end of the year so passed, but would definitely consider it if he is still available next year.
My very hacky attempt at solving this involves overlapping short range requests, and finding the scaling factor of best fit between them: https://github.com/bspammer/rebuild_trends
I'd be really interested in hearing if there are better approaches out there to squeeze this data out of Google.
Also, I had never heard of unreadit.com before reading your article and it looks exactly like something I've wanted. Thanks for that!
Congratulations and thanks for writing it up. It was a great read.
Yeah you can subscribe to stay updated here: https://explodingtopics.com/subscribe
We're going to make that much more prominent in the future, currently it's in the footer :)
And yeah, unreadit.com is awesome and Fab the guy who made it's a really nice guy!
Do you mind sharing the "x" multiple in the acquisition? I think in tech the norm is a 10-14x multiple for acquisitions...but this case seems different in a few way (6 months, no investors, etc...).