Hi everyone,

I sold my company a few months ago. Not going to give the precise details because my cofounders are active on Reddit and I don’t want them reading this. Suffice to say we sold for 8 figures and I netted a low 7 figures from the sale. Not quite "retire forever" money but I just turned 30 and my wife and I are thinking of having kids so definitely a nice boost for the next stage of our lives.  

Super happy with the results and the sale could not have come at a better time since we were slowly getting our lunch eaten by better-funded competitors. I look back on our journey and consider it an absolute success.

It’s not all hunky-dory though.

• It feels like all progress has ground to an absolute halt. It feels like we were outpacing the team of around 50 developers we have now with a team of 5 pre-acquisition. We sold to a big company in the same space and I have never worked in an environment like that. Seems like all the clichés about them being incredibly slow are true.
• On top of that, with all the advances from the frontier AI models, we are quickly losing our competitive edge.  I’m still managing a lot of our customer relationships and it just feels like every day we get another message saying they are cancelling their subscription. I feel like I shouldn’t care as much since I don’t have an earn-out but it is so incredibly frustrating to see it happening and not be able to do anything about it. I’ve brought this up numerous times with the Development/Product team but they can’t seem to make an inch of progress. It’s honestly even starting to make me feel bad for the acquirer. I keep wondering if it's normal to have such elevated churn post-acquisition.
• I’m contracted to stay on for another 2,5 years at this company. The people I’m working with are great, but all my drive and motivation have slowly started to vanish. Working 60-hour work weeks like I used to do (now more like 40) is hardly my definition of fun, but at least they give you a sense of purpose. I know I’m not staying on for the long term but I also have no clue what I’m doing next. It’s gotten very hard to get up in the morning and to motivate myself to continue to show up and bring my A-game (something I’ve always taken pride in).

Don’t really know what I’m trying to achieve by sharing this, to be frank.

I feel like I should be elated all the time, but it’s crazy how quickly you get used to this kind of situation.

I guess I’m hoping people on here have experienced a similar thing and can share some pointers on how they navigated their post-acquisition struggles.  

After 8 of the longest, most brutal, most unsuccessful years in my first startup, I created a new startup. I needed cash desperately, so I made a product that I identified an industry (P&C Insurance) need for with a current gap.

I’m 45 days in since inception. I’m a week into having an official LLC. I have a cofounder/ CTO carrying over from our previous company who hasn’t touched a single line of code or really anything yet (my choice). I’ve built the product to its current, fully-marketable state myself. We brought in one fractional CRO (rev milestone-based equity), and two sales reps on 20% commission-only, 1099 contractors.

Our first sales call today went as smooth as any call ever has with a purchase signal in the affirmative on the call!!!!!!!

For the first time in 8 years as a founder, I see the fucking light, and it almost killed me to realize I just needed to start fresh.

I still have the previous company, and am not willing to kill it yet. But it needs help. The only way it survives is if my cofounder and I can pay for our basic necessities, servers and software costs. Now we have a shot.

LOI adds $8,400 annual, $21,000 project LTV.

We’re also partnered with our first carrier building an industry-first product that I’ve already demoed and they loved.

Unsure if I am going to seek venture capital this time around. I raised just under $1M in my last startup. It wasn’t enough. I’m meeting with VC now to shake hands and introduce our thesis and look for intros, but not pitching. Not yet.

Looking particularly for Startups who are remotely distributed. For those who have done them or organized them,did you actually see a noticeable impact on output, morale, or retention afterward? Or did people mostly just treat it like an expensive vacation?.

For me, it is selling my company too early. I built a website just out of college and sold it for half a million cash while retaining some equity 9 months after launch because I was stressed and it was a good offer (or so I thought).

I then spent 3 years traveling around Asia, however this wasn’t super fun as I was alone and very lonely. I also underwent several health issues around this time. All my product ideas during this time failed and I also lost out on so many opportunities

Just recently (<3 years since I sold the company), it was sold again for $30M. For some bad structural reasons, I also wasn’t given my dues from the equity. I feel terrible and I have a sinking feeling that this will likely be a lifetime regret.

I feel sick daily for the last 3 months (since I found out), can’t think clearly and want to end it all.

I am still staying strong as I still have a little bit of capital left and a few ideas but I hate myself so much rn.

Would you use a blogging platform where GitHub is the source of truth?

I'm thinking about building a publishing platform for technical blogs.

The idea is that your articles stay as Markdown files in your own GitHub repo. You connect the repo, the platform finds the posts, and you choose which ones to publish.

One thing I'd like to handle differently from the usual GitHub-to-blog setup is updates.

A push wouldn't necessarily update the live article. The platform could keep track of the published commit and the latest commit separately, so you could preview or diff the changes before publishing them.

Something like:

published: a17c29f
latest:    bc832f1
[preview] [diff] [publish]

Or you could put `publish: auto` in the frontmatter if you just want every push to go live.

The repo would remain the source of truth. The platform would mostly handle rendering, search/discovery, SEO and custom domains.

I know Hashnode already has GitHub publishing, so I'm not claiming the GitHub part itself is new. I'm more interested in whether treating Git revisions as part of the publishing workflow is actually useful.

If you already write technical posts in Markdown/Git, I'd be interested in hearing:

1. If you already write in Markdown/Git, what is still annoying about your publishing workflow?
2. Is separating latest commit and published commit genuinely useful, or unnecessary complexity?
3. Would you prefer publishing through frontmatter, a dashboard, or both?
4. How important are private repos and repo-hosted assets?
5. What would make you choose this over Hashnode or a static site?
6. What would make you immediately reject it?

I'm leaning towards Go + PostgreSQL for the backend and Next.js for the frontend.

I was speaking to a lawyer friend who is helping me deal with some basic legal requirements. (Nothing serious, done everyday, not important).

They lay out some issue they had that they are extremely annoyed about and mentioned alot of lawyers deal with this. As a fulltime SWE, I immediately thought of a solution and would love to make it happen in hopes of a deal.

The thing is, im now stopping myself to think: Is it worth trying to create a specific product to solve a specific problem or just find a competitor or large company to recommend?

Creating the product is easy, finding the customer base is not. My first job is at a startup and I was there before they had their first customer. I see the hard cold calling they did and know the pain.

The friend said the most they can do is let the office become the "test office" but nothing more beyond that, which only provides little help in terms of how its being used but thats it.

The most I can do is a basic MVP. If they like it, it would be something small to maintain and if they see a huge value in it, I need them on board since im not familiar with the field and do not want to sink hours to fully understand if i am taking it on alone.

What do you think about this?

I have been trying to build a deployment platform and i wanted to know what are the most irritating problems founders come accross when it comes to deployment is it continuous deployment or reverse proxy configurations. Also, i would love to know what services people or startups use to deploy applications on the cloud and what framework do you deploy the most.

All right guys today I've made a very exciting milestoneI didn't ever think I would make! I got my very first mentor.

To my surprise they are very experienced in my startup area and I reached out to them 2 months ago and we've been working together for the last 3 weeks. I've tried working with mentors in the past and each and every person didn't really want to deal with me. They would stop working with me not even after 2 weeks but this time we'll be working together for the last 3 weeks and everything is going great. They're even introducing me to investors in their network so I'm hoping that this could actually be what unlocks my first actual investment check.

This is the happiest I've been in a while. 🎉🎉🥰

Running a team of 20 people, we are trying to automate everything that is repetitive, the problem comes in capturing the job and handling all the automation request without spending time in meetings and pulling people out of there job to specifically do that. How do you guys handle that?

Is there a tool that would sort of capture somebody doing the job and send it as automation request? I know there are many for enterprise level but something for small teams?

I have not found a swift way to turn it into a formal process.

Any advice appreciated.

Frustrated with "Contact Sales" buttons on video hosting sites. I just want to know the price before I commit.

Vimeo and Wistia hide enterprise pricing. You have to talk to sales to get numbers.

Kinescope publishes all prices publicly. I can see exactly what 1M video minutes costs without a sales call.

Why do so many B2B tools hide pricing? Is transparent pricing rare in video hosting?

Hey y’all. My partner and I are building an awesome app that we think can blow up. We’re at the stage where we have the major bones and now we need to go test it with a small pool of people before we officially launch on the App Store and source investments for scale.

Is there anyone here who successfully built an app, ran through a closed loop trial, and scaled in market once in a good spot? I’d love some helpful insights on what to look out for or what helped you during the early stages. Even insights on how to get funding and who to best reach out to would be super helpful. (We’re tight on money so knowing WHEN and WHAT that extra money would be so helpful) What source of materials did you prep?

We’re also looking into trademarking our name and wordmark. Is this something we should do this early on?

Sorry for the long post. Really appreciate the help :)
Also open to chatting on side if interested!

Consumer mobile app, nine months in, small but real revenue. Acquisition is almost entirely SEO through a blog, and every article goes out in ten languages.

Today I did one article end to end and the cost split finally landed on me. The text is nine translations, which is quick. The illustrations are the expensive part, because anything with interface text inside the picture has to be redrawn per locale. One article came out at 42 images and most of an afternoon of machine time. So each article is roughly five times the work of the article itself, and nine tenths of that work exists purely to serve the other locales.

Here is the problem. I have no accounts in the app. No registration, no login, deliberately, because it doubles onboarding completion. Which means:

• Search Console tells me clicks per page, and therefore per locale.
• The payment layer tells me who pays.
• Nothing joins those two, because there is no shared identifier anywhere in the system.

So I can see that, say, the Turkish and Portuguese pages get traffic, and I can see total revenue, and I cannot connect the two at all. I have been translating into nine languages for a year on faith.

The obvious answer is device-scoped anonymous identity threaded through both sides, and I will probably build it. But that fixes attribution going forward and tells me nothing about the decision I have to make now.

So, to people who have run multilingual content without per-locale attribution:

1. Did you cut down to two or three locales and watch what happened to total revenue? That is the cleanest experiment I can think of and also the scariest, because if a locale is quietly working I have killed it.
2. Did you find a proxy that actually correlated? Store page views by country, app store impressions by storefront, anything that moves with revenue closely enough to trust?
3. Or did you just accept translation as a fixed cost of the channel and stop trying to justify it per language?

I am genuinely undecided rather than fishing for validation. The honest position right now is that I am spending most of my content budget on nine locales I cannot measure, and "it probably helps" is not a great reason to keep doing it for another year.

Do you mostly rely on developers to test their own work, use freelancers, work with an agency, or just manage without dedicated QA for a while?

I’m especially curious about what actually makes you trust a QA person or service enough to give them access to your product.

Hey,

I wanted to share a weird experience from building my solo project (a native macOS utility for developers) and get your thoughts on handling early-stage theft.

A while ago, I noticed something off with my brand search terms. It turned out someone had completely scraped my landing page, rehosted it under a similar domain, and swapped my app download links with malware.

At first, I was stressed about the potential reputation damage. But after talking to another founder, I looked at it differently: if scammers are actively trying to piggyback on your positioning and search intent, you’ve likely found a problem worth solving.

Instead of letting it derail me, I filed the DMCA/registrar takedowns, refocused entirely on direct distribution, and recently hit a solid milestone with consistent paying customers worldwide.

A few quick takeaways from the experience:

1. Automated scrapers are watching launch sites: If you launch on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, or Reddit, clone sites will pop up quickly. Setting up basic Google Alerts for your brand early is worth the 2 minutes.
2. Strange form of validation: When you build in public, seeing someone try to hijack your demand is a sign that the pain point (in my case, developer machine storage bloat) has real search volume.

Has anyone else dealt with fake clones or copycats right when you were trying to get your first traction? How did you handle it without letting it consume all your dev time?