1,113 karma · joined June 28, 2007
Host of Startups for the Rest of Us.
Co-founder of https://tinyseed.com and https://microconf.com.
Author of Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup: https://startupbook.net
Started https://www.drip.com
I've invested in 125 startups, including WP Engine and SparkToro.
I'm a Silver Age comic collector and D&D enthusiast.
Startup for the rest of us (podcast) tracks better with my current day thinking.
There’s a major chunk of the book that’s high-level mindset and strategy that still holds up. The detailed tactics do not (unsurprising given we’re 10 years out).
Yep, that makes sense. I’ll say most marketing books I listen to that are 10 years old are brutally out of date.
The focus on detail that made the book a success also made it go out of date relatively quickly.
It needs an update. That is on my to do list most years (between running MicroConf and TinySeed) and one of these days I will circle back and get it done.
Honestly, this weighs on me. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for years.
I’ve been meaning to update this for years but hard to find the time. Right now MicroConf and TinySeed are keeping me busy, but it continues to be on my long-term list.
Hoping to share our findings in the next month or two.
>> if a little dated
Argh! I know. I literally opened the Doc this week to start to parse out sections to update. It’s overdue ;-)
Those are contrived numbers for this example, but you get the idea. I expect more of them to be singles/doubles, fewer to fail than the typical VC bets, but we'll have no home runs.
When YC launched I wasn't in a place to take advantage of what they had to offer (already had a spouse and child + house and couldn't relocate). And I haven't seen anything else step in to do for the rest of us what YC did for VC-backed startups.
So far it seems to be resonating, so fingers crossed.
~~scribbles down note to update and release a 2nd edition of book~~
TinySeed will be able to back companies with smaller aspirations, but that are much more likely to succeed, and don't aspire to get on the funding treadmill of raising every 18 months.
Percentage equity => We're working on that now. More info to come.
Absolutely, no questions asked. Several reasons:
1. Acquiring an app with product/market fit puts you ~18 months ahead of starting from scratch. Like most founders, I'm not a very patient person. I'm now working on GetDrip.com, and it took us a long time to hit p/m fit. The slog to get there is the worst part of launching a product, IMO.
2. Financially, this was a game changer for me. During the course of my tenure with HitTail, revenue + the sale prices funded multiple angel investments, the budget for building and launching Drip, and many other things I would not have been able to afford previously.
3. The acquisition and revamp were also game changing for me in terms of what I was able to learn, the content I was able to produce from it (multiple MicroConf talks). Both are important to me.
Even without the sale, the learnings and financial rewards were still a major success for me.
>>Will you be going through the trash to find your next treasure?
I've already started my next one, GetDrip.com. I built it from scratch with a co-founder, and I can't count the times I've said "I'm never going to build from scratch again!"
I try not to say "never," but if I could choose build or buy I would buy. Every. Single. Time.
Re: valuation - reputable online businesses are typically valued in the 2-3.5x annual net profit range. See http://feinternational.com/blog/how-do-you-value-an-online-b... for more info about valuations.
But honestly, it comes do to what the market is willing to pay for a financial (as opposed to strategic) acquisition.
I've known Patio11 personally for going on 5 years. He's one of the most honest people I know and I've seen him donate countless hours to helping fellow bootstrappers.
If you don't know him or his story first-hand, and haven't seen the hundreds (thousands?) of hours he's donated to the bootstrapper community, you should familiarize yourself with his story before commenting on this thread.
The second is that when you've spend this much time working on a project, watching it die because you no longer have the time/focus to work on it is painful.
I've been in this situation several times, and being able to hand a project off to someone who will take decent care of it is far better than seeing it go under. There is a personal connection to projects like this, to the point where the time invested in selling it might not make sense to an outside observer.
It appears that KWFinder asks you to enter a phrase and provides a list of long tail keywords. So it's more similar to LongTailPro or the Google Keyword Planner than HitTail - meaning it pulls from a single database of keywords they have compiled or otherwise have access to pull ideas from.
Seth Godin talks about it as doing the opposite of what your lizard brain is telling you to do.
Stephen Pressfield calls it the resistance and talks about how you conquer it.
But whatever you call it, I've found that I've made the huge leaps in my professional life when I've conquered the fear (of blogging, public speaking, podcasting, launching apps, etc) and succeeded at something that really scared me.
Might be better worded as "The more gambles I've taken, the better I've become at figuring out if my next gamble is going to work. But your mileage may vary."