A few years ago I sold all my stuff to explore the world, creating 12 startups in 12 months and building $1M+/y in companies as an indie maker such as Nomad List and Remote OK. I'm also a big pusher of remote work and try to analyze the effects it will have on society. Follow me on Twitter or see my list of posts. My first book MAKE is out now.
Jun 12, 2014

How I did not sell my startup today

Entrepreneurship

Today, for the first time, I was asked to sell one of my startups as part of 12 startups in 12 months.

Congrats on a great site w/ Go Fucking Do It. You must be getting a ton of interest in your 2nd startup, any thoughts of selling? I’m interested.

Regards,

I was kinda excited, so I asked what his price range would be.

I was looking at $45K.

Best of luck whatever you decide to do. You have a remarkable talent.

The final offer was $45,000 (or EUR 33,000). Now with Dutch tax grabbing 52% of that, I’d be left with about EUR 16,000.

Do or don’t

I considered it since it was only a month’s work. But I felt it wouldn’t cover the potential of the site. If I can scale it up to 10x, it can generate double that offer in revenue annually. So it’d have to be a strong multiple of that before I I’d consider selling it.

I’m having way too much fun with it still. The whole concept and execution is still so fresh and doesn’t bore me yet.

Also, I’m trying to build startups here, not be just an expensive web developer (at EUR 16k/m).

What’s the goal here?

This has made me think about what my actual goal with this is.

First of all, it’s having lots of fun and learning things like startup development and marketing.

Second, it’s about meeting lots of interesting people in the startup world (which I have already).

Third, it’s being able to maintain my living standards with my projects without having to get a job.

Fourth, it’d be fun to attract investment for one of my projects and work together with a team to really scale something to 1M in revenue.

Fifth, it’d be fun to sell one of these off for an actual good amount of money that would give me a few years of runway of financial independence to build new stuff while traveling.

Conclusion

It was fun to experience the feelings you get when this happens. And very flattering too. It may show I’m on to something here that I can scale up…so let’s go fucking grow it.

P.S. I wrote a book on building indie startups called MAKE. And I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. I don't use email so tweet me your questions. Or you can see my list of posts. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:

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The achiever in crisis

The free fall that is coming home after traveling the world