> Ironically, the biggest multiples it’s generated for the industry have been from a low-dazzle text forum written in Arc Lisp.
Wholeheartedly concur. I'm yet another datapoint for this statement. I picked up programming, picked up a tech stack, found jobs, and launched profitable sideprojects, all with the help of this site.
No, please no. Hyperlinks exist, and they work just fine. HN is one of the last few sites that doesn't glamorize the UX (nothing wrong with that). I'd rather read a thousand words than a picture.
I used to think this way about Reddit, but they added embedded images to posts and it works great. There are many times on this website where people talk about seeing something cool but cannot attach or embed images describing what they are talking about.
I just upload an image to my CDN or a video to YouTube (I know, I could do better) and add a link to it. I don’t mind that. Adding image support makes me worry people would use it to meme too much.
I think this is true for images on posts, which I don't want to see. I was specifically referring to posts in the sense of comments. I want the ability to embed images in a comment.
There a lot of popular old reddit where the attached image's link is dead since it was hosted on a 3rd party site. So I think it would be nice to have image support in HN
From my experience, x arr is not a reliable metric for products of this size. They don't exactly have risk covered returns due to their size and they're usually bought for their growth prospect than any meaningful return it can give.
I didn't have any particular expectation per se, any x arr with the potential baked in is fine. But the most conversations I've had are bog-standard x months of profit and people looking to acquire it as an asset, which makes sense for them, but doesn't for me as I mentioned before the risk is pretty low in keeping it myself.
First of all congrats for creating something and achieving some traction. However, on the valuation side I think the things are a bit different. The size is just too small to justify a higher multiple, because you have to maintain the product, invest in marketing, etc. Until at least 5-6k mrr the buyer would be at a net negative (either hire someone to maintain or do it themselves and in a lot of countries the mrr is enough for neither).
A strategic buyer might buy it for the potential, but also at that size they can likely copy it quickly and with a bit of marketing scale it up.
I guess it's a bit of this and bit of that. The products I've sold before or discussed with others were on the former side. I think that was largely due to the metrics that are usually used to qualify (churn, MoM growth, etc.) are bit less impactful compared to a mature, stablized product.
It's mostly seen as a jumping board for them to quickly get going, compared to finding idea, building it, getting some SEO footing, etc. That's just my anecdotal experience btw.
I did fell into that pitfall when I built keenly. Just wanted to build something new.
But then, only when I received good feedback I thought to proceed with it.
I won't deny, the new thing is definitely appealing because it's new. But you make a good point about finding myself in the same place again.
I've had some good options presented here and I'm leaning towards focusing on rosterbird and try to get a growth engine going and then, maybe, once it's sustainable, I can try new things if I still wanted to.
There's probably room in your life for both. Keenly becomes another side project.
The smart money though is on the thing that's working. Take the time to understand why it's working, and how it might grow future wise, and user wise. This is not fun like programming but makes the things you build more successful.
At the same time put some limited hours into keenly. It makes a good distraction, and we all like a change from time to time.
Always remember that building things successfully takes multiple skills. You've got the programming down, but learning the rest can be just as satisfying.
And don't be scared to ask for help. There are lots of successful people around you who can help if you just bother to ask.
Good feedback is worthless. If they’re willing to pay for it right now, that’s maybe worth something (they need to actually use it too). I recommend reading The Mom Test, it’s a great book about how to navigate this early validation stage from a non-sales perspective.
Focus on the product that’s making money with minimal effort. You will learn a lot in the process (it may make sense to bring in some contractors to help you along in certain areas). Maybe you find you really don’t want to take that any further, at least you’ll have a much stronger understanding of the product, market, etc which will help you sell it off for a higher price and fund focus on the next thing.
Valuing a profit-generating business that's making $1m in revenue as zero is reductive.
Valuation of business isn't necessarily determined by profits (perhaps for commodity businesses), It's just one of the metric. This is a business that has strong operations, product, assets, and IP, honestly quite surprised with this take.
Also, a nit fwiw, you automatically assumed the entire profit of the business is the market salary for the person running this business
I don't really disagree. It's a naive analysis, but ignoring the opportunity cost of the time the owners put into a business, which I was replying to, is even more naive, and yet an extremely common mistake small business people make.
We don't know that it is profit-generating, since the author doesn't take a salary. As for the assumption that the profit would be soaked up by the market salary for the founder, the fact that he's a former Google engineer or whatever is a pretty decent indication that this is true.
I would agree that most people would take some job flexibility/autonomy in lieu of part of their bigco salary, but my guess is that this particular Xoogler would be making well more than $236k (including stock) if he had stayed at Google.
EDIT: that doesn't mean he should have stayed at Google, just that his market salary would very likely soak up all of the profits this year. If he can keep up the growth (and ramp down his hours), then it would be clearer that the enterprise could throw of cash even after paying for all the labor.
That’s the thing though, it’s a Google engineer’s market salary, and likely the author’s as well. But the OP was drawing the conclusion that whoever’s running the business has to be paid the same amount, that’s what I wanted to address.
> I would agree that most people would take some job flexibility/autonomy in lieu of part of their bigco salary
This is one of the point the author has repeatedly stressed the importance of and I very much agree as well. The chance to chart your own journey and the excitement a business could bring is anyday more valuable than the predictable path of employment for many (including myself)
> Also, a nit fwiw, you automatically assumed the entire profit of the business is the market salary for the person running this business
Not really a big assumption given that the person is capable of operating an entire software and hardware business by themself.
It’s more complicated than that, though: The salary someone receives from a company isn’t 100% passed through untouched. To pay everything from taxes to benefits, the most they could realistically expect to take in equivalent compensation would be closer to $150K (approximate), which is actually below market rate just about anywhere for someone with these qualifications.
The point is it isn't profit generating by any reasonable definition of profit and doesn't have some obvious path to get there.
Taking into account all the things you mention, many reasonable people who spend time buying and selling businesses all day would value this business at zero.
The nit is generous - 236k is not going to cover the iq points and hard work required to do the role of this owner.
Thanks for this! I’m very surprised about the overwhelming support for Altman in this thread going as far as calling the board incompetent and inexperienced to fire someone like him, who now is suddenly the right steward for AI.
This is not at all the take, and rightly so, when the news broke out about non profit or the congressional hearing or his worldcoin and many such instances. All of a sudden he is the messiah that was wronged narrative being pushed is very confusing.
Don’t be. Almost all of it are speculations at this point and no one from inside is going to reveal the secret in a random HN comment.
And also, think about this, unless you’re a shareholder with openai, knowing the “opinion” of others isn’t going to impact your life in any form. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read it or participate in the discourse, but there’s no need to be overwhelmed by opinions let alone build a chat bot to get through it.
Yeah agree with all of the above but with one modification: We can spend a lot of time reading through 1800+ comments, and that's time when we're usually trying to just get a question answered like "what does everyone think happened?" etc.
Storytell's vision is to distill signal from noise → giving you a different way to navigate 1800+ comments where you're the one in control of how you spend your time doing it is our objective here.
Agree. There’s definitely use to get a general pulse of whats happening. This isnt directed towards storytell or such apps, sorry if that came off that way.
I was addressing the parent’s comment about being overwhelmed about not being able to go through the opinions. I’ve felt similar way before I realised they were just fomo. If anything, apps like storytell are actually better way to consume these things :)
I wouldn't say this one to be frugal, but then frugality varies by different parameters. What they priortize (Eg: a dedicated marketing tool vs sending marketing through app itself), what their expertise in (hosting in vps vs aws vs heroku, etc), the type of service, team size and so on. As there are 10 ways to do the same thing all with a different tradeoffs.
Being solo myself, I aim to keep my costs as low as possible as well. Until my last product, all my previous products I kept the running costs to $3 per month (just for the server on hetzner). Rest all were free services (tawk.to for CS, Zoho for email, postmark for emails, and so on). Granted they weren't making much, just couple of hundred dollars per month, but then it was pure profit and it got fun to measure the returns in profit than just revenue.
For the latest one, all in all I spend around $30 per month with close to $1250 in mrr. So it has generous spend to return ratio. The only three running cost are the helpscout (for customer support, docs, etc.), google workspace and the servers with Hetzner. HelpScout and Google workspace were my way of "splurging" the costs.
Last I checked I was using close to 16 services (ranging from marketing to revenue tracking), so weren't really skimping on tools to save costs either.
The free tools (including several the op mentioned) are awesome to get started, but many of these services' costs would jump multi-fold even if you add one other team member or go just above the limit. That's anyway all these services' business model as well.
I think the author here is prioritizing simplicity of deployments above all else, because he realizes time is money. The amount of time to build something VS paying to use an off the shelf item is an important decision to make, and I think the author made good decisions across the board
The author does come across more as a business/operations person first, developer second. Most developers would not consider tools like ahrefs or intercom or even realize that marketing is generally more difficult/important than the develpment work itself
Relatively speaking even at all these costs I would consider this to be frugal. If your a skilled developer you would easily be worth at least $100/hr
Taking off the shelf solutions with easy scalability of services for adding additional people operationally is important
time saved is time earned, time is money, and money saved is money earned
Would you be able to share what your products are? I'd love to host a small service like this, but struggle to come up with something that would be both useful and profitable at a small scale.
Sure. Broadly this is the list. Many of these are my go-to's for all my products. Only the Project management, I had to keep trying new things. Most favorite for now is Trello.
Also, I use dokku for deployment, so it's very similar to heroku and uses heroku buildpacks.
I used to do programming projects on the side for almost 10 years now. Programming has been my hobby, passion or time-pass whatever you could call it.
At the beginning, these projects was my vent from the day job to learn new tools/tricks, try out random stuff, nothing specific. And I mostly don't finish it, I just move on, because I didn't have to complete those. Some were open source, many weren't.
And then one of my project that I spent hardly few hours on got some 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt. So many emails, new follows, it was exhilarating. It pegged me into submitting my next project to PH as well. Though it didn't get as much recognition, it was covered by few tech journals, then some more followed. Suddenly I had users who were using something that I've created and I started charging for it. When it started making money, albeit little (i think at the most it was $100/mo), it changed things.
A thought arose, "I like building sideprojects, what if I get to do this full time!". It was exciting!
After that, I could never go back to working on my projects for just "fun". It always had to have some business reason. Can it work? Is the idea worthwhile? What is the revenue potential and so on. Suddenly, I'm not just programming, but doing customer support, marketing, trying to promote the project, etc.
Eventually, I wasn't doing the thing that I enjoyed and by pursuing it for commercial motives, it had become something else entirely.
I think many of us fall into this pit either by chance or being egged from outside. In my case, what I enjoyed was just programming. I conflated it with building a business. Unless you are famous or successful, almost anything that are pursued by passion alone, had to morph into something if you want it to support your life.
I just went full-time a month ago to try and build some profitable products. And I'm trying to get that "fun" part into the full-time thingy again. Can I truly work on things I enjoy, try new stuff and still make money out of it? Only time will tell. If the results don't come, so be it.
As others here pointed out, Meta does not have a good history of launching completely new products separately and succeeding in it (except FB ofc). So it’s a wait and see.
If they’re going to ride on the coattails of the existing influencers, might make more sense to keep it a feature than a brand new app. The existing influencers would have no extra incentive to spend efforts on a whole new app if they’re addressing the same audience and won’t be gaining new set of audience.
Or keep it completely new to excite new wannabe influencers and they will put in the extra effort and drive activity at the beginning.
Wholeheartedly concur. I'm yet another datapoint for this statement. I picked up programming, picked up a tech stack, found jobs, and launched profitable sideprojects, all with the help of this site.