Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?
Yes it booked everything, I just had to click the final pay button. I did run my itinerary against a fresh session like: 'There are errors in my travel plans, go find them'. It found one issue where I was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
Which is good if sailing is what you wanted and like to do, which is what the author and the OP is implying. You don't necessarily have to "succeed" or "reach" somewhere.
What I wrote isn't about "success". It's about direction.
What the author is at risk of doing, in my opinion, is pretending to a certain extent that he can have his cake and eat it too. As I wrote in my original comment, "you can't have it all."
Please don't take this to mean that you have to choose between your family and career (or a business). That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that, at a certain point of "ambition", there is no perfect balance possible between all the the things you're trying to maximize.
The wise person accepts that sometimes you have to make choices, and choices always require that you give something up to get something else.
Excellent, you reached the point that Edward Elric, from the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, arrived at in the final episode(s): The illusion of balance, when everything in that world revolved around the Law of Equivalent Exchange.
Sometimes the rewards do not match the sacrifice/effort, but that doesn't mean you won't pick that same choice when given the chance, or that it was a "bad choice". If you accept what may come from your choices, you can more objectively act upon them.
I’ve had similar experiences. I now have an explicit line in AGENTS.md to not use subagents unless explicitly requested. It also helps that for the tasks that are big enough to benefit from subagents are also the ones with high chances of going off-rails and/or a poor review phase. I’d rather do the orchestrator role and that way I can split up the review phase in a much more manageable chunk.
I'm beginning to build/host a series of own-use, self-hostable products for personal benefit, starting with an LLM chat for me & my wife, a photo manager, our personal calendar, "whitelisted" youtube app for kids in our home, investment tracking, story/music playlist for our kids, and so on. Plan is to run and maintain our own ecosystem of essential products for our family.
> Ironically, the biggest multiples it’s generated for the industry have been from a low-dazzle text forum written in Arc Lisp.
Wholeheartedly concur. I'm yet another datapoint for this statement. I picked up programming, picked up a tech stack, found jobs, and launched profitable sideprojects, all with the help of this site.
No, please no. Hyperlinks exist, and they work just fine. HN is one of the last few sites that doesn't glamorize the UX (nothing wrong with that). I'd rather read a thousand words than a picture.
I used to think this way about Reddit, but they added embedded images to posts and it works great. There are many times on this website where people talk about seeing something cool but cannot attach or embed images describing what they are talking about.
I just upload an image to my CDN or a video to YouTube (I know, I could do better) and add a link to it. I don’t mind that. Adding image support makes me worry people would use it to meme too much.
I think this is true for images on posts, which I don't want to see. I was specifically referring to posts in the sense of comments. I want the ability to embed images in a comment.
There a lot of popular old reddit where the attached image's link is dead since it was hosted on a 3rd party site. So I think it would be nice to have image support in HN
From my experience, x arr is not a reliable metric for products of this size. They don't exactly have risk covered returns due to their size and they're usually bought for their growth prospect than any meaningful return it can give.
I didn't have any particular expectation per se, any x arr with the potential baked in is fine. But the most conversations I've had are bog-standard x months of profit and people looking to acquire it as an asset, which makes sense for them, but doesn't for me as I mentioned before the risk is pretty low in keeping it myself.
First of all congrats for creating something and achieving some traction. However, on the valuation side I think the things are a bit different. The size is just too small to justify a higher multiple, because you have to maintain the product, invest in marketing, etc. Until at least 5-6k mrr the buyer would be at a net negative (either hire someone to maintain or do it themselves and in a lot of countries the mrr is enough for neither).
A strategic buyer might buy it for the potential, but also at that size they can likely copy it quickly and with a bit of marketing scale it up.
I guess it's a bit of this and bit of that. The products I've sold before or discussed with others were on the former side. I think that was largely due to the metrics that are usually used to qualify (churn, MoM growth, etc.) are bit less impactful compared to a mature, stablized product.
It's mostly seen as a jumping board for them to quickly get going, compared to finding idea, building it, getting some SEO footing, etc. That's just my anecdotal experience btw.
I did fell into that pitfall when I built keenly. Just wanted to build something new.
But then, only when I received good feedback I thought to proceed with it.
I won't deny, the new thing is definitely appealing because it's new. But you make a good point about finding myself in the same place again.
I've had some good options presented here and I'm leaning towards focusing on rosterbird and try to get a growth engine going and then, maybe, once it's sustainable, I can try new things if I still wanted to.
There's probably room in your life for both. Keenly becomes another side project.
The smart money though is on the thing that's working. Take the time to understand why it's working, and how it might grow future wise, and user wise. This is not fun like programming but makes the things you build more successful.
At the same time put some limited hours into keenly. It makes a good distraction, and we all like a change from time to time.
Always remember that building things successfully takes multiple skills. You've got the programming down, but learning the rest can be just as satisfying.
And don't be scared to ask for help. There are lots of successful people around you who can help if you just bother to ask.
Good feedback is worthless. If they’re willing to pay for it right now, that’s maybe worth something (they need to actually use it too). I recommend reading The Mom Test, it’s a great book about how to navigate this early validation stage from a non-sales perspective.
Focus on the product that’s making money with minimal effort. You will learn a lot in the process (it may make sense to bring in some contractors to help you along in certain areas). Maybe you find you really don’t want to take that any further, at least you’ll have a much stronger understanding of the product, market, etc which will help you sell it off for a higher price and fund focus on the next thing.
Valuing a profit-generating business that's making $1m in revenue as zero is reductive.
Valuation of business isn't necessarily determined by profits (perhaps for commodity businesses), It's just one of the metric. This is a business that has strong operations, product, assets, and IP, honestly quite surprised with this take.
Also, a nit fwiw, you automatically assumed the entire profit of the business is the market salary for the person running this business
I don't really disagree. It's a naive analysis, but ignoring the opportunity cost of the time the owners put into a business, which I was replying to, is even more naive, and yet an extremely common mistake small business people make.
We don't know that it is profit-generating, since the author doesn't take a salary. As for the assumption that the profit would be soaked up by the market salary for the founder, the fact that he's a former Google engineer or whatever is a pretty decent indication that this is true.
I would agree that most people would take some job flexibility/autonomy in lieu of part of their bigco salary, but my guess is that this particular Xoogler would be making well more than $236k (including stock) if he had stayed at Google.
EDIT: that doesn't mean he should have stayed at Google, just that his market salary would very likely soak up all of the profits this year. If he can keep up the growth (and ramp down his hours), then it would be clearer that the enterprise could throw of cash even after paying for all the labor.
That’s the thing though, it’s a Google engineer’s market salary, and likely the author’s as well. But the OP was drawing the conclusion that whoever’s running the business has to be paid the same amount, that’s what I wanted to address.
> I would agree that most people would take some job flexibility/autonomy in lieu of part of their bigco salary
This is one of the point the author has repeatedly stressed the importance of and I very much agree as well. The chance to chart your own journey and the excitement a business could bring is anyday more valuable than the predictable path of employment for many (including myself)
> Also, a nit fwiw, you automatically assumed the entire profit of the business is the market salary for the person running this business
Not really a big assumption given that the person is capable of operating an entire software and hardware business by themself.
It’s more complicated than that, though: The salary someone receives from a company isn’t 100% passed through untouched. To pay everything from taxes to benefits, the most they could realistically expect to take in equivalent compensation would be closer to $150K (approximate), which is actually below market rate just about anywhere for someone with these qualifications.
The point is it isn't profit generating by any reasonable definition of profit and doesn't have some obvious path to get there.
Taking into account all the things you mention, many reasonable people who spend time buying and selling businesses all day would value this business at zero.
The nit is generous - 236k is not going to cover the iq points and hard work required to do the role of this owner.
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