I sold my side-project for $30k
In this 2020 acquisition retrospective, @marckohlbrugge reflects on the journey of bootstrapping and successfully selling their business. The deal highlights significant financial milestones ($30k).
Hacker News peers debated transaction structures (cash vs earnout), founder tax strategies, and life after liquidating a long-term indie asset.
As a user of this service:
You built a service, I started to use it, I was happy to pay for it. Now you sold all the data your business had about me and the service, so I need to check the new EULA etc, and need to reevaluate if I want to use this service futher along the way.
Also my experience with apps/services/etc sold by their original creator(s), that they are shuting down in a year or two and I'm so tired of this trend.
So yeah, happy about your success, unhappy about another service which probably goes down the drain and I need to find something else to use, which probably not really has the same featureset.
Edit:
My point is, I would have been using this service and paying for it in the next few years, without the need of new features or so, so you only need to do maintenance of the infrastructure and keeping up with the security updates for mostly passive income. Probably this is the same for other users of the service. I think this should be considered, when you thinking about selling your passive income sideproject.
Marc has 26k followers on Twitter and owns https://wip.chat, https://betalist.com/ and a startup job board - all of which give him regular touchpoints (and trust!) with potential side project buyers.
You might be able to build an app like this in a weekend or a few weeks, but unless you have a similar capability / vehicle to market it, you're going to struggle to sell it for anything.
The first $10,000 is cash upfront with no strings attached. The remaining $20,000 is contingent on Tweet Photo making that much (or more) in revenue within 24 months of the acquisition.
I'm not sure I'd call that $30k given the current revenue needs to grow more than 5x over the next 2 years to get the 20k (assuming the acquiring company even continues to monetize the project). Is that really the terms?
Nice score, but why do you think that guy wanted to buy it? Little revenue/userbase. Moreover, he or some contractor could have built the same product in a weekend.
Also, assuming you get your money in 24 months and using a discounting factor of 5% (which is either much too high or much too low), you are looking at a little over 28k, not 30k.
On technical side: I wonder what APIs this service (and others like Zapier) use. Original Instagram API is all but closed to devs, and the new Facebook APIs are limited and reduced to "business accounts". Any good APIs I've seen are libs that reverse-engineer Instagram's internal APIs and use those.
I figured some of you might enjoy this story. I talk about how my Medium post on setting up Zapier to tweet your Instagram photos, lead to a SaaS product that recently got acquired for $30,000 (with one asterisk, details in the post).
It's not a life-changing amount of money, but I think it's a more typical example of what you can expect when selling a bootstrapped side project. Hopefully it will inspire some of you who have been on the fence to start your own project.