'We sold our home to build a social network'
In this 2017 acquisition retrospective, @timoth reflects on the journey of bootstrapping and successfully selling their business.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Unsolicited buyer inquiries versus running a deliberate auction process require very different negotiation leverage.
Bootstrapping for years without external capital provides extreme freedom, but exits are often triggered by energy depletion as much as financial gain.
Retaining ownership of code and operations creates pride, but transitioning to an acquirer requires letting go of absolute autonomy.
Community Debate Themes:
Hacker News peers debated transaction structures (cash vs earnout), founder tax strategies, and life after liquidating a long-term indie asset.
CATEGORY Startup Exits →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 35 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 43 comments
It would be interesting to see how many of the startups that got really huge had an initially negative reaction on HN. We know that most startups fail, that means GDX (the subject of the article) will probably fail, so all the negativity is really just a statement of the bleeding obvious.
There is a big chicken-and-egg issue here, in that they need to get a large number of users on the site in order to make it somewhat self-sustaining. That pretty much seems to be what is happening now - yes, this is a PR puff piece, that means they're serious about growing the site.
If there's an interesting enough niche, people will come to this. I remember seeing boxrec.com in the very early days; it was still a server under someone's desk and had a handful of users - but the guy who set it up knows boxing inside out. We don't know the background of this family, but I don't think this is just a "let's set up a social network!" hail mary.
The play-by-play looks genuinely interesting, and we know people want to talk sports in real time. They use Twitter for this (poorly), and Facebook, but it's not a venue for hard-core sports fans. If they can bring together detailed play-by-play across a variety of sports, and enable people to talk about it together, and maybe bring in streaming / commentary (maybe this is phase 2), this is a very interesting proposition. Building that kind of audience would be massively difficult of course, but also clearly very valuable. Bet-in-play is huge, and that's just one aspect.
I wish them luck. I hope they're not as all chips-in as described, but it feels to me like an interesting idea that should create a valuable product.
A few things:
1. An "idea" is nothing. An "idea" is not a competitive advantage. If it does take off in even the slightest, Facebook will just copy it, throw resources behind it and crush them.
2. What is their "unfair advantage"? From what I can tell none of them are developers, designers, or have a network of people that they can leverage in the industry.
I, like most other people here, have what I think is a great idea for business. I'm not going to quit my relatively well paying job for it or risk my family's well being for it.
I'm going to talk to people I know in the industry I'm targeting, I'm going to personally use my skill set to develop the web site and the backend on nights and weekends and host it on AWS.
After I do the first rough design using Bootstrap. I'm sure I can scrounge up enough money to find a real designer to do high fidelity mock ups that I can use to make a presentable site.
The most realistic case is that it will turn into a little extra income. Worse case, I'm out of a few hundred bucks in AWS hosting cost, spent some time getting better at a few technologies, and I have a portfolio of well designed code I can show when I'm interviewing.
Not to denounce their work but the website and app looks pretty terrible. I would imagine they would have enough funds to hire good developers after selling their house and cars. The article also talks about a funding from a Russian investor.
I was really interested in knowing how and where did they actually spend money. I dug further:
- They have 100-500 installs on app store.
- A good amount of their twitter followers are spam with most of their tweets with keywords such as giveaways and contest.[2]
- Their play by play commentary is coming from performgroup.com. I would think this would be their highest cost.
- Their site is hosted on aws.
[1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.gameday&hl=en_GB ↗
[2] - https://twitter.com/GamedayXtra/followers?lang=en ↗
What could be the significant cost here?
Well, that seems drastic. After reading the article i am not convinced. They don't have the one big argument why one should use their app. Just being a bit better in something is not enough when building something like this (though i don't think they are actually better, just look at their app [0]). I use onefootball and it works fine, i don't even use most of it's features (especially the social-media ones)!
[0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.gameday ↗
I had a marketing client/photographer have me build a web site for local sport clubs. They updated the site with scores plus thousands of photos of the athletes. The idea was to sell the photos to fans and parents. It was a decent idea, but I think they priced the (digital) photos too high, and the amount of work for the return just never surfaced.
This doesn't sound like an organic growth social network, and I feel they are misjudging the ROI on all the investment of time, effort and money.