Author here.
Happy to answer take any feedback and answer any questions about this post.
replies(9):
Happy to answer take any feedback and answer any questions about this post.
Now that you've been through this process, how would you go about finding a buyer yourself?
Also, are there any resources you found valuable for starting your business? How did you go about hiring your first employee and setting everything up for them as employees?
Again, thanks for the writeup and congrats on the sale!
>Now that you've been through this process, how would you go about finding a buyer yourself?
It would have been tough to find a buyer. Before I met Quiet Light, I was worried a broker wouldn't take me, and I'd have to find a buyer myself. So my plan was to (in order) start more loudly telling other founders that I'm looking for a buyer, reach out to more adjacent companies pitching them on a strategic acquisition, discuss on my blog that I'm looking for a buyer, and if all else fails, put up a banner on the store website saying the company is for sale. The problem was that the more loudly I advertise the company is for sale, the more obvious it is to buyers that I'm desperate to sell. It also risks spooking customers who might not want to buy hardware from a company whose ownership is about to change.
>Also, are there any resources you found valuable for starting your business?
Minute for minute, the best resource I've found is Jason Cohen's talk, "Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business."[0, 1] The key insight for me is that bootstrapped businesses have very different strengths and weaknesses than a VC-backed startup, so you should pick a business that plays to those strengths.
I also enjoyed Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling [2] and The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick[3]. The tl; dr from those is that you need to avoid the trap of building something for months and then looking around for customers once it's done. You instead should flip it and talk to customers before you even start and find out what they need.
It's not a book or resource, but one of the most valuable things I did and wish I did it earlier was create a course. It's a very condensed version of the experience of bootstrapping a business because you need to identify a need, create a product that fills the need, then market it to customers. And you don't have to be the world expert on anything, you just need to know enough to get someone who's at level N to level N + 1 and who likes the way you explain things. And you can pick a small topic and create a course with 30-100 hours of work.
I spent 60 hours on my first course, and it made $10k, so it's not like a smash hit, but it's the highest ROI thing financially I've done since quitting Google.
>How did you go about hiring your first employee and setting everything up for them as employees?
In the first few months, I was assembling all the devices, packing boxes, and printing out instruction sheets myself. It wasn't sustainable because I was also trying to write code and do customer support. It was during COVID and my wife and I were quarantining strictly, but she also was looking for a job since she was in grad school, so she was employee #1.
We started with just Google Docs. I'd write things and share them with her, and she'd ask questions or make updates.
My next hires were developers, which was a pretty dumb decision because it's the most expensive role, and it's the job I like doing most myself. I was finding that I didn't have time to advance the product because customer support was taking too much time, so I should have hired a customer support person. But I hired devs because I'd hired devs before and worked with a lot of devs, so it was a role I felt comfortable hiring. For that, I tried to add lots of automated checks on Github and document things there. I also wrote guidelines on my blog that became official guidelines for devs within the company.[4]
We moved into an office in early 2021, and at that point, I had to hire real W-2 employees rather than contractors. For that I used JustWorks, which I hated. I switched to Gusto, and they were poor but not terrible. In the future, I'm going to avoid creating a business that needs W-2 employees because in the US, it's just set up so badly for small businesses to manage the paperwork around it.
As we were moving into the office, we also switched from Google Docs to Notion, and I had a good experience with Notion. It's set up well for internal documentation, and it's user friendly, so it's easy for everyone to do basic searching and editing.
I could go on and on about hiring, but those are the biggest things that come to mind.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw
[1] https://mtlynch.io/notes/designing-the-ideal-bootstrapped-bu...
[2] https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/start-small-stay-small/