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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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 💩.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.