How much of the company did you own when you sold it?
How did the sale happen - did someone just turn up and offer you money, or did you go find a buyer?
Was there negotiation from a higher price down to $10M?
Did they buy the entire company from you or just buy the software assets?
How long did the sale take from when the buyer turned up till money in your account?
How much money did you end up with after paying tax on the sale?
What did you do to celebrate?
What did you do next - another business, get a job, sit at home watching TV?
Would you have handled the sale process differently if you could do it again?
I kind of needed to raise the money. The wheels were falling off the bus because the software was so bad and it needed to be professionally written. I should have raised less and sold sooner though.
I’ve seen owners (either single or partners) who own between 5% and 100% of the business when they sell it. Unfortunately, most of them seem to own between 5 - 35%.
Most of the sales I’ve been involved with are the company trying to find a buyer. However, occasionally a VC will flat out ask if the company is for sale. Though it’s probably 10 to 1 in my experience.
There’s usually some level of negotiation. There is a “SAAS multiplier”. Right now the VC I consult for looked at about 3 - 5 times EBITDA. This gives you a healthy negotiation range.
People should absolutely consult an accountant and an attorney when figuring out what to do with the money they make. Often if you handle it right you can pay significantly fewer taxes. Taking stock or equity is a good way to handle reduction of those tax burdens.
I’ve seen people celebrate by buying multiple very expensive cars. A house on the beach in Hawaii. Huge trips. I’ve seen people blow huge amounts of money very quickly. The fastest was two guys who blew through $3,000,000 each in 6 months. It was stupid.
Most of the sales i have been involved in kept the former owners in a working capacity at the company.
I hope this helps a bit. Obviously it’s just my observations.
When I first saw indiehackers, I was in love with it. The execution was fantastic. You did a great job.
Then it got bought, and changed. Now it's forum-first, interviews second, and half of them are sort of locked.
Why do you now have to sign up for a forum to view the older product interviews? It's super annoying, so I just stopped reading. It also seems detrimental to the people who gave interviews early, they wanted press, rather than being hidden behind a sign up thing.
Is there any interest in reverting from this pinterest-style login-wall, or is that just too costly?
If this sounds blunt, it's only because I'm disappointed that a site a loved became less fun to use.
The page was more clearly arranged and you could browse it without being logged in or having an account. There is also this ridiculous "stripe-verified" badge for businesses doing business with Stripe now, which is not that interesting for indie hackers I guess.
It also seems the interviews are not that important anymore, but being some kind of community is - but I don't think that people want that, because we have that already here or at reddit - the nice thing were the interviews.
That's a fair point I hear quite a lot. Not sure what the reasoning is there (assuming it is the case).
>> It also seems the interviews are not that important anymore, but being some kind of community is - but I don't think that people want that, because we have that already here or at reddit - the nice thing were the interviews.
Have to really strongly disagree on this point... The IH community is - without a shred of doubt in my mind - the single most impactful thing Courtland has built at Indie Hackers. Happy to believe that you don't want that, but there are a lot of founders and lurkers on the IH forum who really do want it...
That it's incredible inconvenient? I don't want to do discussion there, but just read what other people tried and did.
The result is that I just make throwaway accounts for such websites to get to the content and I appreciate if I don't have to do that.
I guess that it's just a Stripe marketing channel and the number of sign-ups supports some metric.
What do you mean by summary?
https://www.indiehackers.com/products
is closest to the old layout where each block linked to the founder interviews. I basically wrote the site off until today because it looked like the interviews had been walled off.