tl;dr We paid a designer ~$70,000 to create some 14,000 stock market icons for us (think AAPL, VTI, SPY, etc). We've only received ~1,500 of them and he's now ghosting us.

Buckle up...here's how that played out and where we're at now... Back in March I tweeted that I was looking for someone to create these icons for us and paying $5 per icon.

Not particularly difficult work but definitely tedious. Got a decent number of inquiries.

https://x.com/Shpigford/status/1765527392410321055

1/ now that @maybe is top-of-mind for a lot of people, let's talk about why it failed last year (or at least my hypothesis) and why i think it's got a solid chance of succeeding *now*.

this thread may get lengthy so...buckle up? 2/ when i started poking around on @maybe in early 2021, the market was...different. thanks to both a stock market that was exploding & a crypto + NFT market that made it feel like there was free money everywhere, there was excitement around being more hands-on with your money.

✨ AI Challenge: I'm going to build an iOS game using only GPT-4 (and probably Midjourney for some design elements).

I have basically zero experience building iOS apps. I've tried to learn the traditional way and failed every time.

May the odds be ever in my favor. Step 1: Come up with a name. Because I can't even begin to build anything without a freaking name. It's a curse.

What are we going with?

A week ago I started researching the world of website flipping. I've been curious about the practice essentially as a way to diversify my investment portfolio.

Today I purchased my first site to flip. Site is currently doing around $250/mo in revenue from display ads + affiliate sales.

I purchased it for $6,500. So, 26x monthly revenue (which appears to be the metric folks use in this space).

1/ Despite Baremetrics being the "first-mover" and arguably inventing 1-click SaaS analytics back in 2013, ProfitWell (just sold for $200m!) and ChartMogul (who passed us in revenue early on and will almost certainly sell for 8-9 figures) became much larger.

Why? 🧵👇 2/ At the risk of oversimplifying things, I believe starting Baremetrics as a side project was probably the single biggest reason we had a drastically lower financial outcome.

This "side project" mentality, in hindsight, affected a lot of early decisions.

Hi potential investors! I'm Josh, CEO of @maybe. And this is a pitch thread as we're working on raising a $5m seed round!

Interested? DM, josh@maybe.co or 205-470-4803

🧵👇🎉 Real, meaningful financial planning and wealth management is currently reserved for people who are willing to pay %-based AUM fees and stay in the dark on how to actually grow their wealth.

1/ We're no longer pursuing building @maybe around part-time/fractional employment.

Here's the note I sent to the team last week.

While I'm still bullish on the concept, I no longer believe it can work for *new* product/software companies. At least it didn't for us.

🧵👇🏻 2/ What I traded away on "managing people" I replaced with infinitely more work around "managing projects". There was just so much overhead to get even basic things done.

We instantly had to try to assemble tons of processes and it just slowed progress to a crawl.

1/ What this has turned in to is a stream of people shocked that a company might have mechanisms in place to filter out applicants.

"You're going to ask someone to answer QUESTIONS?!?!?!"

...yes.

"With, like, WORDS?!?!?!?"

...that's right.

https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1436879082990473217

2/ Look. We can either do the filtering at the start of the process, or you can get days/weeks in to the process & still, statistically speaking, get filtered out.

The job application process involves filtering down a pool of applicants. That's how applying for *anything* works.

1/ It's always really interesting to me how many people espouse resumes.

Having read through thousands of job applications, I've never seen a resume that did a better job communicating ability/skill than a few free-form text fields. 2/ I get it. When you're applying to dozens or even hundreds of jobs, having to actually write out answers is exhausting and can be demoralizing (especially when you never hear back).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

1/ Story time on one of my biggest professional regrets.

Back in 2006, I was deep in the freelance world, doing UI design for all sorts of companies.

Somehow, Adobe ended up reaching out to me to do some exploratory UI work for a mobile design product they were working on. 2/ I was a year out of design school and had been freelancing full-time for just a few months. I was nervous working with a company that large...especially one so well known in the design world.

1/ Underutilized practice for staying sane: blocking.

Blocking accounts on social media. Blocking keywords. Blocking email addresses. Blocking calls.

No one has a *right* to your attention. Ever. 2/ With social media, I block/mute all sorts of keywords to keep my timeline clean. I'm also incredibly quick to block accounts of people who clearly have no interest in civil conversation.

1/ Fun milestone: @Baremetrics had its first fully-profitable year in 2019!

$151k in profit on $1.38m in revenue. 2/ The very large majority of our expenses are wrapped up in payroll (nearly $900k). All other overhead was, more or less, negligible.

1/ The first version of @Baremetrics is now open source!

I built this over the course of a few weeks back in 2013 really to just scratch an itch. Turns out other folks had that itch too. 🙂

github.com/Baremetrics/ba… 2/ We no longer use anything from this initial version I built, but we're publishing it to show how little you need to get started building a business.

1/ Massive lesson learned today regarding running a remote company: you must register as a foreign entity in every state you have employees.

I incorrectly assumed that using a PEO absorbed all the tax nonsense. 2/ It absorbs it for payroll taxes. It does NOT absorb the taxes/fees every state charges for the "privilege" of hiring someone that lives there.

And boy do states love to get greedy with those charges.