Cult app Cheddar up for sale, solo hacker explains why | Hacker News Reader

Cult app Cheddar up for sale, solo hacker explains why

venturebeat.com

33 pointsiisbum34 comments

"Cult classic"? I've only ever heard the name via self-promotion.

I thought the same when I read the sensationalist title and opening remarks. Personally, I've always thought task warrior and org-mode were the most popular among hackers with OmniFocus being the go-to program for Mac die-hards.

It's also worth mentioning that the developer of Cheddar works for the author's husband as seen in the footnote.

Thanks for reminding me of TaskWarrior, I'll take it as my annual reminder to check it out :-)

My entire life--from work and home projects, to future someday/maybes--is in OmniFocus, and it's been irreplaceable so far.

> It's also worth mentioning that the developer of Cheddar works for the author's husband as seen in the footnote.

Yeah, I guess it's just a silly fluff-piece.

a Ruby programmer is now a "hacker" too...

No offense, I love Sam, he is brilliant and cheddarapp is fantastic. But from a business side of things: Who in their right mind would buy a $12k/year revenue business for $125k?

My feelings, too. I can understand why Sam feels it's worth $125k, based on the amount of hours he put into it, but a potential buyer will (most likely) evaluate this as buying a business -- and from that perspective the price looks really steep. You'd need to grow the business 10x just to break even.

That being said, there might be someone out there who's been contemplating building a task app business, and this would give them a really nice head start, product-wise. Or, perhaps it would make sense for a larger company (OmniGroup? Panic?) who can devote substantial marketing resources to it.

Nonetheless, I wish him the best of luck. He's a likeable guy and has obviously put a ton of love into this product -- it would be nice to see him enjoy some monetary return on his efforts.

I could see criticizing the price, but the reason you guys are criticizing it for are ridiculous. If you buy a company for 125k and make 125k/year in revenue you dont break even, unless your expenses are insane or if you think the business can't last more than a year.

The person who would most likely buy this app is maybe a company that thinks they could bring the revenues up, integrate this into something theyre working on, and add value. Is it worth 125k? I don't know, but I imagine we will know soon.

I guess my main point is that Sam seems to be setting the price based on what Cheddar is worth to him personally, rather than some kind of growth/potential calculation (or so I assume -- he doesn't go into how he arrived at the $125k price tag, aside from alluding to the number of hours he put into the project). That makes a harder sell, IMO. Buyers are going to look at how much potential Cheddar has as a business, not how many hours Sam put into it.

BTW I'm not suggesting this is the wrong way to sell it -- if it takes $125k for Sam to feel OK parting with Cheddar, that's totally valid.

Fair enough, I just objected to the idea that one needs to have revenues=value to "break even". Just the complete wrong way to think about it.

I don't wanted to say that it should make 125k a year to make it valuable. But the ratio has to make sense. Just compare to the Sortfolio Sale: 120k rev/year sold for around $450k, makes far more sense. (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2899-sortfolio-deserves-a-bet...)

Facebook bought a $0/year revenue business (Instagram) for $1B. :-)

If I recall, this is the same fellow who wanted to charge some astronomical fee for iOS project consulting. I suppose this strategy has paid dividends before for him?

Obviously not.

No, that was Mike Lee.

http://soff.es/one-thousand-dollars-an-hour

Ha, didn't realize he did it too!

The problem with Cheddar is that it's a todo app. There are a billion of them already. I wasted an entire afternoon trying to decide which productivity app to use (the irony was not lost on me). There's already too much choice.

FYI: I almost went with Nozbe but settled on Trello.

Is this seriously a todo app that has a monthly subscription fee?

Paying for sync services isn't weird at all. Apparently it has upwards of 600 paying customers.

Sorry, it's weird to me. More power to the author for finding a revenue stream but it certainly brings out my cynicism. The revenue stream is on a house of cards since there is no "service" being paid for and the fact the author is asking $125k for such a fragile revenue steam is just strange.

How is synchronization not a service? It requires maintaining remote servers, and someone has to pay for them. Not that I think the price is reasonable, but that's a different matter.

iCloud provides this for free

Good joke. You've already paid for it, remember?

Somehow I doubt your 1 kilobyte todo list will require you to alter the amount of iCloud storage you purchase beyond your first free 5gb.

I'm a paying customer. It's not that much money. The seamless/instant sync is why I pay. He could use a few more features, which I did email him about them.

The one lesson I think people should get out of this again is that it's really hard to get consumers to pay for a nice to have, here as if you solve a real business problem, companies will pay a lot more.

I just switched from Asana to WorkFlowy which seems very similar to Cheddar. WorkFlowy is awesome, because it is so simple. In my mind, it is perfect for software development management and managing bugs, todo's, etc.

Here is a nice intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...

Shameless, I know, but if you signup for an account use my referral code, we both get 250 more items a month free.

https://workflowy.com/?ref=eaca8a6

Is it free? I'm a solo freelancer and can't afford a 10$/month service.

Yeah it is free, with a premium version. The free version does everything I need so far though. They also have mobile versions.

I'll second WorkFlowy, but I don't know if the two are comparable. Worfklowy is completely freeform. There are no lists. Only one recursive list.

$125,000 to buy everything? I can see why he'd ask for that, seeing as it's popular, has a growing user base, includes everything you need to continue operating.

$125,000+ to hire him or somebody else to build something similar? That's what seems slightly absurd to me.

800 hours (20 weeks) of consulting service for $125k. That's about $6.25k per week, which seems reasonable for high-quality engineering. Some folks would charge more. The key is if you believe it would take 800 hours to re-create Cheddar.

Because he got bored working alone and lost his motivation.

Usually people open source their projects when they want to stop working on them.

This project is already open-source.

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