1/ The idea that you “only answer to customers” when you’re bootstrapped is really just silly.
2/ The implication is that if you take any type of funding, you now only do what your investors want. Which is also silly.
3/ When you’re bootstrapped, you answer to your mortgage, your student loan debt, your need to provide for your family, etc.

Which is, of course, all well and good. But don’t act like your customers are the only ones you’re serving because you’ve refused outside funding.
4/ Taking even small amounts of funding many times opens you up to take the most basic of risks you’d otherwise have avoided. It lets you live and support your family while you figure things out…and yes, it’s okay if you haven’t figured it all out at the start.
5/ The vast majority of funded startups aren’t making decisions based on maximizing returns for their investors at the detriment of everything else. In fact, most investors don’t *want* that because they know long term that hurts them.
6/ The whole “bootstrap vs VC” argument is exhausting and usually perpetuated by people who’ve never actually had any experiences on the VC side.
7/ Yes, there are awful stories of VCs being The Worst™, but the extremes aren’t the median.

/end rant…maybe
8/ Err, one more. 🤪 There are SOOOO many different funding options these days. Each with pros/cons. If you actually dig in to them, I think you’d find many of them very founder friendly and a solid option for getting your company off the ground.

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More from @Shpigford

10 Apr
1/ Figuring out which problems to tackle first with @MaybeFinance has been challenging.

Ultimately we want to help people be in control of their finances and their future without the need for a middleman (i.e. a financial advisor).
2/ But one of the reasons this problem hasn't really been solved well is just how varied each individual/family is when it comes to their finances.

It's very much solvable, but it just means we'll have to build this in phases and the first few phases will absolutely fall short.
3/ Not that they won't be useful, they will. But this isn't something we can build in a few weeks or even a couple of months.

Generally speaking here are the phases I've laid out in my head...
Read 12 tweets
12 Jan
Notion, but where pages load in <30 seconds.
I'd LOVE an macOS/iOS/iPadOS-native take on this space.

I feel like humanity is ready for the kind of app that offers more than the overly-structured typical word processing/spreadsheet software, but not at the expense of speed.
Folks throw out so many "better alternatives" to Notion, but they're almost always extremely text-focused or spreadsheet-focused, which is just polishing the same 💩.
Read 4 tweets
10 Nov 20
1/ Going to use this thread to answer questions folks have about the @Baremetrics acquisition!

I attempted to cover everything in my blog post, but wasn't able to touch on everything without it becoming a small book. 🙃

baremetrics.com/blog/i-sold-ba…
2/ What did the team get?

$300,000 went to the team. All team members who had stock options got the full value of their options and then folks who didn't have options (we stopped issuing options a couple of years ago) received a bonus based on time with the company.
3/ Why did @gcvp and @BessemerVP walk away from their $800k?

I won't speak directly for them, but I'll say they're some of the most founder-friendly VCs I've ever interacted with.

They made an exceptionally generous decision and any founder would be lucky to work w/ them.
Read 6 tweets
3 Jul 20
1/ Last year I failed to sell Baremetrics for $5m, but I learned a ton, and one of those things was the world of asset sales & stock sales.

This is about to get real nerdy but this is crucial if you’re trying to sell a company. It could literally save you millions of dollars.
2/ Depending on how your company is set up, you’ll have the option to do an asset sale or a stock sale.

In an asset sale, you’re selling the assets of the company as opposed to the company itself.
3/ In a stock sale, you’re selling stock that the company has issued and generally you’re selling the majority of the stock such that the buyer controls the company thanks to their majority share.

You’re basically selling off ownership of the company.
Read 16 tweets
2 Feb 20
1/ One of the biggest misconceptions I see from first-time founders is what multiples they could sell their company for.

So, let's talk about that a bit, in an effort to downplay the notion that you'll get filthy rich from your company.
2/ I'm going to overgeneralize some things here, for the sake of brevity. Yes, I understand there are always exceptions, but chances are you aren't it.

First up, let's talk about the reasons someone buys a company.
3/

1. Flipping
2. Revenue
3. Acquihire
4. Strategic

Again, there are other reasons, but those are the big ones.
Read 14 tweets
23 Jan 20
1/ We sold @Baremetrics Intros for $100,000 last year. Storytime!

baremetrics.com/blog/we-sold-i…
2/ In 2018 we launched a product called Baremetrics Intros, which essentially helped companies and investors find each other based on their actual data instead of just who they knew. Three months later…we shut it down.

baremetrics.com/blog/sunsettin…
3/ It was, commercially, a failure. We just couldn’t get any investors (our target) to fork over any cash. We opted to shut it down instead of going deeper down an already risky rabbit hole.
Read 15 tweets

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