

Nodester: Side-Project to Acquisition in 18 Months - cmatthieu
http://blog.geekli.st/post/31303088029/nodester-side-project-to-acquisition-in-18-months

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yesimahuman
Hey Chris,

Sorry if this was obvious, but did you just sell the product, or did you sell
the whole company (or something else)? How do you manage the acquisitions yet
still keep GetVocal your own company?

I'd love to chat with you a bit more about this, as I've been in some similar
situations and would love some advice.

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cmatthieu
Great question. GetVocal, inc. is the legal entity running all of my start-ups
as DBAs. Each start-up is a service of GetVocal, inc. The acquisitions are
easier than buying a company with liabilities and shareholders etc. Only the
product/service (Nodester) is sold by GetVocal, inc.

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jetz
can you please expand on this? everybody says C-CORP for a startup for
flexibility, investor trust and so on. OTOH, C-CORPs are costlier and more
complex. but you're an INC and "real" startups as DBAs! if you make blog post
on this that would be great.

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foxylad
I's be open to exiting my successful bootstrapped startup, except I have
absolutely no idea what an acquirer might pay. I've never broached this with
potential investors because I'm afraid my asking price might be
catastrophically high or low.

Can you let us know roughly what the deal was worth? Even the number of digits
would help.

~~~
cmatthieu
Contractually I can't provide any details on the deal but I can tell you that
the offers were very different depending on the company's perceived value.
Nodester would have probably been worth even more to a PaaS company that
didn't yet have a Node.JS play. Even having a Node.JS offering, Nodester has a
strong community and brand with instant credibility. In the end, you need to
be happy with the opportunity and people.

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charlieflowers
Chris,

Congrats, and thanks for sharing. Could you clarify one thing for me? Nodester
was an open source product you produced. So what was the business that got
acquired? Did you also launch a business based on the open source Nodester
product?

Thanks, and again, congrats!

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nihonjon
Did you contribute back to the open-source community or individuals you (pick
a verb: leveraged, used) for profit each time?

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nihonjon
Since I was downvoted please allow me to explain by expanding on that question
with more questions:

What sort of license did you have on Nodester's code prior to acquisition?

You said "We also used the following open source libraries / NPM modules
written by talented Node.JS / Javascript developers:"

For any open-source work you used, did you leave the original author's
copyright or credit in the code?

Did you pay the original authors anything for their work?

What types of licenses were used in the code you forked?

At what point did you let everyone know you were closing the public repository
and making it private so you could sell it?

I apologize if this sounds abrasive, but this smacks of getting people to work
for free under the notion of a truly open-source project.

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seanschade
Thanks for sharing Chris. It has been fun watching Nodester grow!

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wamatt
Congrats! :)

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mortdeus
I also cant code for any of my projects unless it has a solid brand to back it
up.

