akcreek

Once you have a Meta for Business account, you can apply for Brands Rights Protection, assuming you have a registered trademark. Our application was approved quickly.

This opens up a set of tools to search for impostors, infringers, etc., and a bulk report option. This is significantly quicker than using the public-facing trademark and copyright reporting forms. Within a couple of days, all imposter pages were removed across FB and Instagram.

They also have a paid service called Meta Verified for Business. This service promises even quicker action on impostors, but there is a waitlist right now, so we couldn't try it. The Brands Rights Protection ultimately fixed our issue, for now at least.

Best of luck to you as it looks like you've got a great start.

Having zero cost of goods sold makes it possible to undercut on prices and pay for all your acquisition and still make a buck. Doesn't seem scalable or sustainable, but it has been a real nuisance for us. Translators are contacting us for their payment...

Upwork has not been willing to help us at all. They pull the ads quickly so by the time support clicks the link, the ad is down. They act as if it didn't happen if the link doesn't still work. Crazy.

There is a lot of fraud out there. Anything you can imagine and then quite a bit you can't if you don't spend your time thinking about how to screw others.

This can be quite nice when working with clients across different platforms like Asana, Trello, and GitHub.

As for downsides, we are a young company and don’t have the full feature set built yet. We are working hard though and making great progress.

As a small team, we all have our areas of focus and ownership, but contribute to many aspects of the business to ensure product and marketing are fully synced. From designing, building, and testing, to documenting, hosting, and supporting, you will own the API as your primary responsibility.

This is a backend heavy fullstack engineering role, but you will have some secondary responsibilities such as technical support for the marketing team, internal tooling, and browser extensions where you'll need solid frontend experience.

Our API is built on a LEMP stack hosted with DigitalOcean. Our framework of choice is Laravel and we utilize many tools from that ecosystem, such as Forge for server management, Envoyer for zero downtime deployments, Cashier for managing subscriptions with Stripe, Passport for OAuth, Horizon for queue management, etc.

Our web client utilizes React, TypeScript, Next.js, etc. You'll need familiarity with standard testing and development tools and technologies such as Git, Yarn, Babel, PHPUnit, etc.

Many more details about the role, team, offer, and hiring process are available here: https://hourstack.com/careers. Email jobs@hourstack.com if you'd like to apply.

There are many prioritization and time management strategies out there, but we intro some of the popular ones [0] and we'll be expanding each of those into detailed posts over the coming weeks. The first one about using the Ivy Lee method to prioritize tasks [1].

[0] https://hourstack.com/blog/16-effective-prioritization-and-t...

[1] https://hourstack.com/blog/how-to-use-the-ivy-lee-method-to-...

It seems to be a subject that trips a lot of people up. It's really common to see people talk about their marginal tax rate as if it is their effective tax rate. "I pay 24% in taxes and make $175K/year" - Not really though, you paid 24% on ~$4K of income, but 10% on the first $19,750, 12% on the income from $19,751 to $80,250, etc. Your marginal tax rate is 24% as that's what you'll pay on the next dollar, but your effective tax rate on all income earned was actually 14% (or whatever it actually is, just a loose example).

In your case, the discount is so significant that I'd think you'd want to showcase that. Maybe a slider to adjust the number of users and show the dollar amount of the discount as well as the total percent saved, which will continually grow as you increase the bucket of users in that lowest bracket?

Or in that FAQ you could give an example of a 300 person workspace and show how the calculation pencils out. Having to do math to figure out the ballpark cost of the product isn't great though, so if the info is public (ie you don't have to contact sales) then you should probably make it super easy to get to.

Just some ideas. You never know, everyone else might get it right away and I could have just been slow on it. My brain definitely went to doing rough math and thinking about how weird the pricing is at different user counts though!

You run into some weird pricing this way. For example, 250 users on the pro plan is $1,000/mo while 251 is $220.88.

If I mindlessly type youtube.com in and hit a error I immediately realize I did that mindlessly and get back to work. I've been doing this for a while and it has worked every time.

My original point was that acquisition entrepreneurship could be an option for someone with a broad skillset like the OP. How I funded the first one doesn't really impact that as everyone will have a different path and I simply took the one that was available to me at the time.

If an existing path can't be found then it will have to be made. That could mean working and saving for a while, starting a side project with the goal of it becoming a profitable business, partnering with a friend and earning equity through sweat, etc.

I did the first three solo and on the last one I had a couple of conversations with my attorney during the process. I wanted the attorney to be fully involved on the last one because the purchase price was higher than the previous acquisitions (high six figures), but the timing just didn't work out. I wanted to close quicker than he could handle so I just went ahead.

Asset purchases aren't that complicated since you aren't brining on liabilities. Still, I'm sure it is advisable to have professionals help with due diligence, contract negotiation, etc.

I read that and immediately thought, well that's for me, so I sent them an email. I had zero clue what I was doing at that point.

The last business I acquired was though a broker; FE International. They have some interesting SaaS listings from time to time. QuietLight is another broker I watch listings from, but they are more in the ecomm, FBA, etc. space though. Less pure software. There are other brokers as well such as Empire Flippers.

There are some marketplaces like Flippa, Sideprojectors, Transferslot, etc.

You can also find a business you are interested in and call them up and see if they might be interested in selling. I almost bought a business this way last year after seeing it on Indie Hackers and reaching out to the owner. We couldn't get together on price though. I was happy to overpay since the business wasn't on the market and I believed in the future potential, but the owner's expectation was just way too out there so I couldn't justify it.

The first acquisition was funded by a loan from my parents for $44K. That was a large sum for them, but they believed they would see it again and they have always wanted to help my siblings and I in any way possible. It turned out to be one of their better investments as I did return that money and a percent of profits for years.

After the first one I was able to continue self funding.

I've been acquiring small but promising businesses that don't have the right team in place to move them forward. I bootstrap them on my own and replace my roles as the business can afford staff. Once enough roles are replaced, I'm able to start looking for the next business. I'm on my fourth business now. Sold the first two, the third is a productized service netting seven figures, and I just acquired the fourth, which is a SaaS business that I believe has great potential.

Currently, I'm formalizing this method and will build a team that can execute it much more quickly than me alone. I'll be shooting for a new business every 12-18 months to build a portfolio. We'll have a group of partners and a small staff that will be focused on getting these acquisitions straightened out and growing, then we'll install a team to run them full-time and we'll go on to the next one.

So just taking what I've been doing for years and everything I've learned from it and scaling it up to reduce the timeframe from acquisition to growth and then operation of the business.

If OP or anyone else who identifies themself in a similar manner wants to chat, email is in my profile. I'm actively looking for people like us to work with.

We're hiring an experienced full stack developer to help us build HourStack. You'll be working on the next version of HourStack's web app along with the infrastructure to power it, our mobile apps, and our future third-party ecosystem. This is an incredible opportunity for the right developer who wants serious responsibility, influence, autonomy, and support while building a unique product that is loved by its customers.

Technologies:

We'll serve up a single API for internal and external consumption via PHP with the Laravel framework (open to other options here as well). The web app will be headless using React or Vue.js and our mobile apps use Java and Swift. You won't work directly on the mobile apps, but you'll support them via the API. You'll be working with lots of common technologies and architectures such as Redis, MySQL, Webpack, Sass, ES6, Typescript, REST, GraphQL, etc. and our cloud of choice is DigitalOcean.

Qualifications:

You've built solid products that customers love in the B2B SaaS space and have experience scaling the infrastructure to support many thousands of users. You have a good feel for great UX and enough of a design eye to make UI decisions when required. You are familiar with all of the technologies we use and have deep experience with most so you can hit the ground running.

You'll also need to have experience working remotely and you'll need the skills that come along with that such as excellent written and verbal communication, self-motivation, flexibility, reliability, etc.

We Offer:

Currently our team is in Seattle, though we work remotely and are willing to consider candidates from other parts of the US. This is a full time position with:

* Competitive salary

* 401(k) with company match

* 100% remote and flexible schedule

* Macbook Pro and other tools needed

* Flexible paid time off as needed

More details and apply here: https://hourstack.com/about

We've even seen this happen with repeat customers of ours. It's tough since Google allows the ads to be very confusing, but then we also have competitors who have blatantly copied our style, content, and have even named themselves in a similar manner.

We also spend just under five figures a month on branded keywords to combat this. We rank #1 organically for all of them, but there are always 3-4 competitors bidding on them so we only get a small portion of that traffic if we don't pay for those keywords and get the #1 paid spot as well.

Even with that in place people will still get duped and click ad #2, #3, or #4 that go to competitor sites.

You'll have property taxes as well, which could be meaningful depending where you live. I was talking to one of my neighbors the other day who has lived in his home here in Seattle for over 40 years and he told me he is taking out a equity line of credit against his fully owned home to pay the property taxes as they've increased beyond what his retirement income can cover.

Once the home gets older you get into more than just maintenance as well; you get into replacement. Replacing the appliances, roof, windows, mechanicals, etc can be lead to some very serious expenses. The same neighbor needs to replace his roof, which he also can't afford until he gets the credit line.

- The change to a W-2 employee for my partner and I meant setting up a proper accountable plan for expense reimbursement. So submitting expenses to the company, recording proof of purchase, etc. and that being processed as non-taxable income via payroll.

- We had to switch from our individual SEP IRAs and setup a Solo 401K. Not a huge deal to set up, but definitely more work as contributions on the employee and employer side are both done manually every month for each of us.

- Instead of a single check per month now there is compensation via payroll and I have to separately calculate and process the distributions for each of us afterward.

- HSA and medial insurance reimbursement is a total pain. We use Gusto and we have to have them make a manual adjustment to the W-2s at the end of the year in order for them to accurately reflect this reimbursement as it can't run through the accountable plan and their system cannot properly process this type of reimbursement. I actually had to have them issue my W-2 3x this year because they did it wrong the first two times. This is another perk of the S-Corp that I forgot to mention earlier though as healthcare reimbursements are counted as W-2 income, but are not subject to FICA taxes. So that increases the income eligible for contribution to the 401K without FICA being paid on it. $7,000 is the 2019 limit for HSA (for a family) and the health insurance is whatever it is in addition to that.

- The setup was definitely a major hassle for me. We had to register with various city and state agencies even though we are exempt from many of those taxes as owner/employees. It took us around six weeks in total to set all of this up.

- One last addition. In order to divert more pre-tax dollars into investments I hired my wife to help part time to work enough to max out her employee contribution to her 401K and then the company adds 25% to that since all employees must have the same employer contribution through a solo 401K. That's not specific to an S-Corp, but it is a good way to save another chunk of pre-tax money for those that are married and in a position to do so.

It gets tricky when your profits get high and the effort of setting up and maintaining an S-Corp becomes more questionable. The 12.4% Social Security stops at $132,900 (2019) in income so if you want to max out a solo 401K (assuming a 25% employer contribution) you'll need to have $148,000 in W2 income ($19K from the employee and $37K from the employer to hit the 2019 limit of $56,000).

So at that point you've already paid all of the Social Security tax possible for the year and the S-Corp advantage is greatly minimized as you only continue to save on the 2.9% medicare tax. That's still something though as there is no cap on that tax.

S-Corp is significantly more work than a standard LLC. You'll have a separate corporate tax return and use the K1 for your personal taxes. You'll have to run payroll as you as an owner will now be a W2 employee and deal with workers comp, unemployment and all sorts of other fees and taxes depending on your state (for example here in WA they just started a paid family medical leave tax on gross wages up to $132,900). Some you'll be exempt from as an owner/employee and others you won't.

There is a lot more to the subject for sure, but those are a couple of highlights to dampen the mood of the idea of huge tax savings...

I'm in a similar position; company #1 is successful and now running without me and I'm switching focus to company #2 and considering the VC route as this business has appropriate scalability. I'm quite interested to hear why you are 0/10 on going that route. Will you be posting that to the facet blog or how can I ensure I see that when posted?