Nodester: Side-Project to Acquisition in 18 Months | Hacker News Reader

Nodester: Side-Project to Acquisition in 18 Months

blog.geekli.st

48 pointscmatthieu11 comments

Hey Chris,

Sorry if this was obvious, but did you just sell the product, or did you sell the whole company (or something else)? How do you manage the acquisitions yet still keep GetVocal your own company?

I'd love to chat with you a bit more about this, as I've been in some similar situations and would love some advice.

Great question. GetVocal, inc. is the legal entity running all of my start-ups as DBAs. Each start-up is a service of GetVocal, inc. The acquisitions are easier than buying a company with liabilities and shareholders etc. Only the product/service (Nodester) is sold by GetVocal, inc.

can you please expand on this? everybody says C-CORP for a startup for flexibility, investor trust and so on. OTOH, C-CORPs are costlier and more complex. but you're an INC and "real" startups as DBAs! if you make blog post on this that would be great.

I's be open to exiting my successful bootstrapped startup, except I have absolutely no idea what an acquirer might pay. I've never broached this with potential investors because I'm afraid my asking price might be catastrophically high or low.

Can you let us know roughly what the deal was worth? Even the number of digits would help.

Contractually I can't provide any details on the deal but I can tell you that the offers were very different depending on the company's perceived value. Nodester would have probably been worth even more to a PaaS company that didn't yet have a Node.JS play. Even having a Node.JS offering, Nodester has a strong community and brand with instant credibility. In the end, you need to be happy with the opportunity and people.

Chris,

Congrats, and thanks for sharing. Could you clarify one thing for me? Nodester was an open source product you produced. So what was the business that got acquired? Did you also launch a business based on the open source Nodester product?

Thanks, and again, congrats!

Did you contribute back to the open-source community or individuals you (pick a verb: leveraged, used) for profit each time?

Since I was downvoted please allow me to explain by expanding on that question with more questions:

What sort of license did you have on Nodester's code prior to acquisition?

You said "We also used the following open source libraries / NPM modules written by talented Node.JS / Javascript developers:"

For any open-source work you used, did you leave the original author's copyright or credit in the code?

Did you pay the original authors anything for their work?

What types of licenses were used in the code you forked?

At what point did you let everyone know you were closing the public repository and making it private so you could sell it?

I apologize if this sounds abrasive, but this smacks of getting people to work for free under the notion of a truly open-source project.

Thanks for sharing Chris. It has been fun watching Nodester grow!

Congrats! :)

I also cant code for any of my projects unless it has a solid brand to back it up.

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