I've built Germany's biggest online resume editor (https://lebenslauf.com), which started as a side project next to my main startup.
Some years ago a friend asked me to help her out with her resume, how to convert it into a proper PDF file etc. – busy and short of time as I was, I simply looked for some online tool to point her to.
Disappointed by the results of my search back then (2011) and motivated to fully design, code and market a small project on my own (after all those years mostly doing management), I started Lebenslauf.com and quickly got fascinated by the idea and technical challenges of a WYSIWYG CV editor.
For quite some time, it remained a side project where I'd spend about 4 hours per week maximum. Meanwhile the number of users grew slowly but steadily thanks to word-of-mouth from my friends and their friends and their friends...
After I sold my main startup in 2012, I finally found the time and fully realized the huge potential of Lebenslauf.com. So I started making it my main project in 2013 and at some point charged money for the created PDF files, which instantly led to five-figure revenues.
About one year later (2014), I sold it to https://xing.com (public company, essentially the German LinkedIn) for a higher seven-digit figure. I managed to get competing bids for it from multiple companies, so the whole sale process is a story of its own.
It's still astonishing to see what has grown out of it and how many people use it every day, and it was an exciting journey with totally different experiences than a venture-funded company.
Talks with other companies started when I planned to rent out white-labeled versions of the site to job portals etc., so they could have their very own branded CV editor and possibly get a revenue share.
During a lunch with the CEO of a German job portal, where we were talking about a white label, he asked me whether it was possible for them to get access to the CV data of my existing users. I replied "You'd need to buy the site then" without actually thinking about it. He in return asked for a price and I came up with 400k euros just to double it in an email hours later ("after carefully calculating again..." ooops double the price :D). When he still was interested, it struck me that a sale might be worth pursuing.
I then contacted his biggest German competitors to get counter offers, and they seemed pretty interested too. Funny anecdote: The CEO of one company told me that they're not actually interested at that price, but that I should tell the others they'd offer a million euros, just because he liked me and wanted his competitors to overpay. He even told me he would confirm that offer if they ask him. I didn't do it of course.
In contrast to the others, XING offered me a deal with a lower upfront payment but a huge earnout upside. I spent quite a few months tracking, testing and analyzing my users' behavior in regard to the earnout KPIs, calculating whether the deal would be better for me and of course negotiating during that time to make it even better.
That's essentially it, I tried to go into as many details as possible without getting into trouble :)
Do you have any advice on websites that generate a decent amount of traffic and email subscribers but are not generating any revenue? I have a website exactly like that but I have no idea what to do with it, and was actually playing with the idea of selling the email list. Would appreciate any advice!
Of course they would have, because they would have already have raised 2.1 million dollars to disrupt the online resume' market and wouldn't be thrilled to get a 7 figure buyout offer.
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing your experience here. We are also bootstrapping a similar product (https://www.resumonk.com) and it's been a great ride so far.
Can we get in touch with you and exchange notes? You are planning to launch an English version, so we might be competitors in near future. But I'm sure it's a big market and there is enough room for all of us. :-)
Would you be down to notify a list when this is done. Maintaining my resume is a huge pain and so far the only site I've been able to use is Resunate and your site is already leaps more user friendly.
Not quite a single-person exit but I think Plenty of Fish [1] is a great story -- one guy builds dating site, bootstraps to 75 people, sells for $575M with 100% ownership.
It's an interesting example you use because I think it still serves the previous point. Peter Drucker wrote, “To sell the Eskimos a refrigerator to keep food cold, is finding a new market; to sell a refrigerator to keep food from getting too cold is actually creating a new product”. (The Practice of Management) This was apparently inspired by a true tale of a Westinghouse salesman who sold deep freezes and fridges to arctic-dwellers. Meat left outside was rock hard and took too long to thaw, and you can't quickly drink frozen water/juice/beer.
My point is, lazy conventional group wisdom is often wrong because it's invested in "the way things are." Mature industries are most vulnerable in my experience (personally, I have experience in the large and old-thinking parking and payment industries). Acceptance of "because that's not how things are done" blinds people to opportunities. The lazy majority are too quick to repeat that dismissal. This adds "weight" to a rejection, but little critical analysis. I have found it productive and profitable to often disagree and swim upstream. I recognize not all industries or product spaces are like this.
At most, people's opinion is uncorrelated with the result. To say that people's opinion is strongly inversely correlated means that people saying "oh my god take my money right now" means you should never follow that idea.
Simply put, you can't have it both ways. You can't both have people saying "no" and people saying "yes" mean that it's a good idea.
Benchmark Capital had the policy that if every partner said "yes" to a deal, they did not fund it - if everyone thinks it's a great idea, there's not enough risk or upside.
Damn, I can't find the thread. His handle is MarcusPOF but the thread was started on another account (obviously). The forum was wickedfire. There are other regulars lurking on HN. Somebody else might chime in.
The forum is dead now and has been for many years. But it had its day. The guy who made and sold Indeed was a regular too as well as other pretty successful people, but it had a ... let's call it a certain vibe.
I was a regular there. IIRC he didn't ask "is starting a dating site a good idea." He already had the dating site. But he launched its ad network on WF. [0] (That's MarcusPOF... pretty sure BenPOF is the founder)
Fun fact: Wickedfire was also around for the launch of "2girls1cup" (if you aren't familiar with this, do not google it) [1] and Riff Raff (now a top-100 artist, somehow... wtf) [2]
No, Ben is an employee. Marcus Frind is the founder of POF and he did make a thread before he was MarkusPOF. It was very early on, not 2009. A couple of years before that perhaps. God it has been so long since then!
The thread wasn't full of people mocking him (wf wasn't like that back then) but people were telling him it's generally not a good idea and he should go niche instead. I've completely lost touch with all of my contacts from back then and I can't find the thread unfortunately, so you have to take it on my word, I guess.
The forum is definitely dead these days, but the marketplace is still "somewhat" active, and there are a few skype groups with active daily participation. It seems like no forum has really risen to take its place. More like the SEO guys went one way (BHW, Skype groups), the PPC guys another (private forums, other skype groups).
A lot of the big players are still active and still making money. If you want an invite to a Skype group shoot me an email.
> Doesn't it seem like kind of a dick move to give no equity to any of the 75 employees?
It's more of dick move to hang worthless equity as a carrot in front of people who don't know any better. Salaries have no vesting periods, no dilution[1], and are presented in cash.
They joined the company knowing that they weren't getting any equity. Also, it sounds like most of the value of the company existed before he hired his first employee.
To corroborate this, I joined one fintech startup when it had 7 people, with no equity, based on salary. The founder's rationale for paying higher salaries and not offering equity was that equity is worth substantially more to founders/investors than employees, due to factors like risk preferences and the fact that they could diversify, so it made more sense for him to just raise more money and pay purely in cash. This made sense to me and I actually wonder why it isn't more common.
I think there are some strong arguments in favour of equity grants:
1. Startups face high frictional costs when selling their equity; providing equity grants along with lower salaries may help to avoid cash-flow problems arising from the inefficiency in the market.
2. In a early-stage startup with inexperienced employees, providing equity grants can remove much of the valuation risk from employees' wages; if they do exceptionally good work, they'll automatically be compensated more by virtue of the increased value of their equity. (This also provides an argument for vesting cliffs: If an employee does exceptionally poor work, they can be fired before the cliff and their compensation is effectively reduced to match the quality of the work they performed.)
3. Psychological biases result in people working irrationally hard for companies which they feel that they "own", even if their ownership share is extremely small.
4. In some cases there may be income tax arbitrage advantages.
> They joined the company knowing that they weren't getting any equity.
Lots of people join companies on bad terms either because they don't realize the terms are bad or because they're desperate for any kind of income. That doesn't absolve the company of any blame for mistreating its workers. (I'm not necessarily suggesting that PoF was actually giving bad terms, it's possible they were paying amazing salaries)
This assumes he had a clear exit strategy. If you read his interviews, it doesn't sound like he was gunning for a major exit -- it just sort of happened.
I'd say giving equity to employees when you have no clear interest in exiting, is a dick move.
I have. DM/email me (lucas@gonze.com) if you want to chat.
My company was Webjay, a playlist-sharing site. No funding, no other devs. 500K users, 10 million page views / month.
Selling was dramatically easier than ordinary because I was getting the whole pie, not a slice, and because I had no investors to placate. I did not get FU rich, and I still have to work, but my quality of life was dramatically improved for the rest of my life.
The hardest deal term in the acquisition was indemnification. I refused to indemnify the acquirer, they insisted on it. Finally I said:
1. If we don't have enough personal trust in this relationship for you to believe in my company's practices, you shouldn't enter this deal at all. And if you do, indemnification doesn't matter.
2. You are a more attractive target than me. Many people would sue you who wouldn't bother with me.
It was harder post-acquisition than ordinary, because I was a faction of one within the acquirer (yahoo).
Your point number 2 is really creative. Did they go for it? Or did they counter that just because people wouldn't sue you (assuming that you don't have deep pockets) doesn't mean that there isn't valid stuff there to indemnify?
Regardless, kudos on thinking up such a creative argument—in many years of lawyering, I've never heard that one.
Glad to hear it! It's actually pretty difficult to disentangle the valid (legit claims against you that would be brought against them, due to increased awareness) and invalid (illegitimate claims brought against them, just to extract settlement value) potential causes of action.
Did you not have to set aside any purchase price in escrow for indemnity? Were any claims ever brought?
Interesting point about the escrow account. They didn't ask. I wonder why they let it go.
I suspect it was because we all wanted to close the deal. Sometimes that's what it comes down to.
The labels complained during negotiations, later on, but never brought claims. I ran a clean house that would have been hard to sue, so the people who were unhappy needed to use other business leverage.
I was a total Webjay fanboi! I loved to let other people find new weird music for me...
I remember you being pretty knowledgeable on the "scene" back then -- what would you recommend today to do what webjay used to? Spotify is very curated and doesn't feel spontaneous at all, whereas Youtube is an unbrowseable cauldron of shit.
I also love Spotify playlists by personal connections who are massive geeks, especially professionals in the music industry. I need to know the person for this to work.
Here's a contemporary indie metal playlist along those lines:
You'll be interested in patio11's experience selling bingo-card creator, which more-or-less meets your criteria of a self-founded, single-person company:
Been running https://officesnapshots.com for 9 years and I haven't sold it or exited, though I have had various offers of varying seriousness throughout the years.
At this point it would be hard for me to see myself selling because I really enjoy running the site. Plus it would feel strange to let someone else do whatever they want with the thing I've created and spent so much time on.
Not saying I wouldn't sell, but I wonder if many other single-person companies are in the same boat and feel the same way. Would love to hear :)
That's a great site, I love the design and utility.
I have a question: Where do the photos actually come from? Do you yourself run around taking pictures of people's offices? Or do you work with the designers to be featured on the site? How did you initially source your images, get the copyright to show them, in order to entice the designers to work with you?
If you are interested in stories of that nature, http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ talks about the process of two guys who've done that before and are in the middle of doing it now. Rob Walling has a separate site, http://www.softwarebyrob.com/, where he talks about the same sorts of things.
hey michael, OP of the referenced post.
Heavy user of gdrive here, hope you're not looking to sell sheetsu just yet, we have some use cases coming for it in the next few months. :)
No, I'm not planning to sell https://sheetsu.com, no worries. It's not worth that much yet. I'm just curious if solopreneurs are selling their companies and if yes, how did they do it. Or if they keep it and profit.
P.S. I'm eager to talk about your use cases for the coming months. You can find my email on the website mentioned above.
Okay so if you didn't post this I would never have known about sheetsu. Great project!
I wish HN would do one day out of the month where commenters could post their "Show HN" that they released that month. Much like the Who's Hiring threads. It would help me find some awesome software that didn't quite make it to the front page.
I like the idea a lot. There's plenty of things I've done that I'd like to share, but don't feel they're noteworthy enough for a whole Show HN, yet my friends aren't geeky enough to appreciate.
The same idea for "Ask HN" would be neat too. A lot of subreddits have a weekly or monthly "Simple Questions" thread which are really helpful.
Similarly, I created www.lite-engine.com for people who want to trivially post data to an SQLite database. I've not attracted much notice yet. I certainly appreciate any feedback on the concept!
Good job launching (and good on you for finding a good chance to drop the link!). :)
I don't have much use for it now, but I have worked in marketing heavy organizations in the past where I would have loved to have something like this.
If I could give you some advice though, it would be to really carefully figure out who you are selling this to and then target your website to that person. Right now, it seems to be mostly targeted to me. That's great, but to be honest, it's pretty trivial for me to set up my own database. And, when I set up my own, I don't have to worry about things like your backup policy, your privacy policy, where you and your servers are located, etc.
I think that you'd have more luck if you targeted it to marketing types. You get close to that in your blog (posting an HTML form with Captcha), but I'd love to see your conversions if you targeted the whole thing to non-technical marketers who work in technical fields.
Thank you, I really appreciate that. I will say I've been hesitant to focus on form posting as the product when the service actually provides a toolkit for much more. What I'm aiming for is a complete backend for serverless single page applications. I'm not conveying that message well at all it seems.
The question is, if you have a company worth selling and you are a single owner and founder, is there any way to build the perception of high value, similar to the valuation perceptions created for venture backed startups?
Some years ago a friend asked me to help her out with her resume, how to convert it into a proper PDF file etc. – busy and short of time as I was, I simply looked for some online tool to point her to.
Disappointed by the results of my search back then (2011) and motivated to fully design, code and market a small project on my own (after all those years mostly doing management), I started Lebenslauf.com and quickly got fascinated by the idea and technical challenges of a WYSIWYG CV editor.
For quite some time, it remained a side project where I'd spend about 4 hours per week maximum. Meanwhile the number of users grew slowly but steadily thanks to word-of-mouth from my friends and their friends and their friends...
After I sold my main startup in 2012, I finally found the time and fully realized the huge potential of Lebenslauf.com. So I started making it my main project in 2013 and at some point charged money for the created PDF files, which instantly led to five-figure revenues.
About one year later (2014), I sold it to https://xing.com (public company, essentially the German LinkedIn) for a higher seven-digit figure. I managed to get competing bids for it from multiple companies, so the whole sale process is a story of its own.
It's still astonishing to see what has grown out of it and how many people use it every day, and it was an exciting journey with totally different experiences than a venture-funded company.