No way that 7, 15x is realistic. From my previous 2 startups none were sold for more than 4x. And these were healthy growing +10m businesses. I am not sure where you got those numbers from. I am curious.
I too was very inspired by the Pinboard numbers, and this story and others have inspired me to start my own business.
I'm running a booking system SaaS (https://zapla.co) which basically allows embeddings a booking widget in any website. It's currently generating $1100 MRR after ~18 months in business. It's a solo side-business as of now, but I'm hoping for it to become my primary business.
If you don't mind me asking I'm curious about the business side of this. I don't expect you to put any real numbers out here but can you make a living of this or is it something you do in your spare time? I would be great if you could elaborate on this a bit. Thanks!
Some years ago in a startup we had a 10k subscriber newsletter for event locatios and made much much more per month than $2000. You might be too cheap.
This is cool, seems like getting this article on HN should be helpful for you.
I like the total net revenue figure, $710 and low expenses.
I'm in a similar range for my side project, a few thousands of dollars (prob a similar net revenue figure to yours) but not nearly enough to take it full time and (by itself, from a pure financial perspective) not enough to justify the huge amounts of time I spend on it it.
A lot of people say getting the first X (3 or 10 or whatever) customers is the hardest, but for me it's definitely been expanding on that and taking it to the next level. One book that seems promising to me is Gabriel Weinberg's book, tractionbook.com, though I haven't had a ton of time to try and implement all the ideas yet.
Nice - you got a business doing 400k+ in revenue per yr, growing nicely. I'm sure someone would be willing to put down a few to several million if you ever sold. Keep it up.
Do you market mainly via word of mouth, pay per click, etc.? Seem like word of mouth based on the growth curve.
It's basically an affiliate business model: you get 5-10% of the cost from the doctor, hotel, and airline (depending on your negotiation skills). $500K revenue means $25-50K in true gross revenue for the company. Their net profit is $3-5K on that revenue, depending on how efficient they are.
I put my business on the back burner for 2 reasons:
1) 5-10% of the cost of the package is your true revenue before overheads, so the it's not very profitable once you consider your expenses.
2) It's a high touch customer service experience, so you can't scale it profitably (people will not buy an operation via e-commerce like they would an e-book: there's a lot of personalized contact and questions, examination of records, etc.).
This number is really easy to pull of if you know how to sell yourself and be social/on the offensive.
$150/month product that saves businesses $4,000/mo (one less programmer). Hard part: Find 70 clients.
Working in industry, we demo products all the time. We pay outrageous amounts of money for an online time tracker which is basically an online spreadsheet. We have considered obtaining systems for managing accounting, supply, etc.
Focusing on our core business, policies, we never get tied up in 2-3 month/year adventures in uncomfortable territory. There is no innovation, just maintenance. We use a 20 year old 4GL language assisted by native Python/C.
I could crank out Android apps in niches, write web content and advertise, build a few cloud based web products (CAN IT EXPORT TO EXCEL!?!?!!!111), and easily live off of 15-20k a month with huge fluctuations (both directions). I choose the simple life of industry.
Not to mention, it is so hard to motivate yourself to go from start to end on a product. Most of that energy was used in my late teens.
Right now, I could be cranking out that turn based strategy Google Glass native app, because native apps with delays in turn taking are going to be the key to Glass (it gets hot!). Instead, I'll just build another fixed width extract with this day. It will run in 1/16th of the time of the original. People will not notice or care until it breaks again. Ad absurdum.
I suppose its worth mentioning, I know a few who pull in 4-6k a month solely on advertising/affiliates. Completely passive, they have months worth of posts automated to go out every 2nd or 4th week. I've pulled off 1-2k using the same method, but I always had a hard time finding microniches that were available for me to dominate. Writing about en pointe ballet, dremels, silver polishing, simms fishing gear etc. is not my ideal goal. It did make money though.
how did the math work out, taking a cut of tips (presumably small, and even smaller after payment processing fees?) how many users would you have needed to reach profitability? i actually tried doing the back-of-envelope math for your site a while back, and was perplexed. i'm curious as to your answer..
I don't know man. They're in the same industry as other large enterprise vendors. If their product works, and it costs more than $15 a user, and they have many 10k user companies, they could see that sort of revenue with 7k customers. I think thats totally doable. There are 600k enterprises with over 10k users.
Would you care to share how you identified the opportunity and estimated potential revenue?
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