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Comment by tallross | Hacker News Reader

There is no formula for how to value a startup after one year. In our case, we had over $1MM in revenue and built some very cool technology that was new to our space. It all depends on the company, the team, and the situation.

Also, while the brand (CraftJack) was a year old, I had started some of the properties we used to generate leads 1-2 years prior to that so was able to build some revenue from there.

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This space tends to be not tech saavy or sexy, but has a lot of dollars. Were you mostly collecting the leads and then selling them off to national buyers like QuinStreet etc? That seems to me like the only way to go from $0 to $1mm in a year. I have a lot more questions like how you deal with leads quality, if you were driving the traffic yourself (PPC, SEO, media buys, etc).

I agree - that would be an awesome follow up post to garner more insights into getting the start-up from day 1 to selling it :)

I started off that way as an affiliate, but eventually, when I launched LocalPainterQuotes.com, which a year later became CraftJack, we started selling direct to service providers and built a lot of technology that other companies were/are not providing to their customers. The revenue increase really came over 2 years as we had some revenue before we launched CraftJack, but it was still pretty quick growth and all bootstrapped. That's one of the things you can do in LeadGen easier than other sectors (bootstrapping).

it also has TONS of players in it.. my first job out of college was at a small lead gen company that had about 5 people working there. the key i think that company had was a crazy good( or just persistent) salesman that looped in the big players in the various niches, ADT, Brinks, Wheaton, etc..

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