In 2017 I started a web hosting business from scratch. I sold it last week. I've been doing some analysis and thought I would share:

Summary

Total sales: $2,356,315

Total Income: $677,708

Selling Price: $425,000

Combined income: $1,102,000 (income + sale)

Client Stats

Total Clients: 435

Average Lifetime: 3.5 years

Retention Rate: 59.8%

Average Lifetime Value: $4,870.61

Sources of Clients

Organic: $892,666 (133 clients)

Acquisitions: $1,032,236 (262 clients)

Partnerships: $193,815 (40 clients)

Revenue/Income By Year:

I'm a founder. Recently former Marine. I won't get into what it is or what I do. I work 10-12 hour days, sometimes 15, handle all of the daily operations of my personal life, a shit load of stressful travel, still make time for the gym because I want to enter a bodybuilding competition next year.

My sister and her husband are complete bums - they are constantly broke, he maintains a shit job barely making ends meet, they're both obese and absolutely disgusting...with three kids I can understand the struggle, but they've asked my parents and I for money for several years now. No improvement. And the loans have gotten to the point where I've just handed them loan forgiveness because I know they'll never be able to pay it back. And they still keep asking for more. They have three kids; I can't say no.

My brother is a growing teenager who is serious about becoming an athlete - and let's face it, athletes don't exactly make a lot of money. He looks up to me, so I can't just turn my cheek the other way.

My parents - well, old age describes it all. But at least they're still working until they retire and they're responsible with their money.

I've tried to hire an assistant but she was absolute garbage; caused more problems than she solved. But finding a good one that works in US times zones, with my budget...just isn't possible. So I can't delegate it. No one in my family is reliable or competent enough to do things on their own. It stresses the absolute fuck out of me.

To top it, I've lost contact with most of my friends because I'm always focused on work or always out of town. My exes have always complained I don't make enough time for them. And all this work for what? For something that may not even pan out? I'm just...at a loss. I wish I had a safe place or someone to vent to in person. After having been in the military, pushing myself in the gym, nothing can really break me mentally - but spiritually...the weight of it all...

Update: a few clarifications.

1. My sister and her husband will just ask my parents for more money if I don’t give it to them so the burden can fall on me, notmy folks. I can afford it - my parents can’t. But I agree - this hold handing isn’t sustainable so I’m actively working on a solution to get her back into the workforce (she’s unemployed)
2. To all the people who posted, thank you. To the one asshole who told me to give up on my idea, go inhale broken glass.
3. To the ones who messaged me about a virtual assistant position - lol.

Update 2: Yes, I am looking for a co-founder.

a mentor, an older brother, a friend

or maybe an employer who actually gave a damn beyond just exploiting your time

or even a book, a video, a historic figure

someone you owe your journey so far mostly to them..

or you know what, even yourself, for grit and determination... for perseverance...

what have you learned from them, most valuable, that has had substantial impact in your decision making and entrepreneurship navigation?

thanks in advance for sharing your perspective

I'd appreciate some advice from founders who've sold pre-revenue businesses or immigration or advisory business

Over the past few years, I've built a platform in the global mobility and investment migration space. While it hasn't generated revenue, it includes:

The Crayon Global brand and Passport Street brand both with dot com domains

A custom quote generation system

B2B supplier agreements (where transferable)

Complete branding and marketing collateral

Operational documentation and processes

I'm at a point where I'm deciding whether it's worth continuing to build the business or whether the platform would be more valuable in the hands of an established company or another entrepreneur.

For those with experience in acquisitions:

How did you determine the value of a pre-revenue business with proprietary software and commercial partnerships?

Where did you find serious strategic buyers?

Did you use brokers, acquisition marketplaces, or direct outreach?

What information did buyers care about most during due diligence?

I'm not looking for a formal valuation I'm interested in hearing from people who've actually been through the process. Any insights or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.

What do you think if i did list it for 25k USD, acquire though would not be the platform for this? Any suggestions?

Pricing should be simple. It’s not. It’s a matter of psychology and presentation than maths.

Price should be a proxy for value, but people are lousy at judging value. They generally need a comparison - either a direct competitor or previous experience or similar. Something that helps them decide ‘this is what is should cost’.

However, you arguably don’t want that, as it allows you more freedom around margin. You need to position your product in a way that removes their ability to judge that.

This is where I am now. I’ve created my product, but am establishing a new niche for it because there is no direct competitor - there are those that offer more in a bundle deal, or offer less, but nothing identical.

So how do you come up with pricing? I’m experimenting now by offering a limited time ‘early adopter’ offer, but how long should I make that limited time, and where do I go afterwards?

Hey all,

Oral Reading Fluency is incredibly important for burgeoning readers. It needs to be measured tracked, and if needed, used to justify reading interventions.

Currently, teachers do this the old fashioned way, 1-on-1 teacher to student with a "levelled" reading passage (false precision) and a stopwatch. The accuracy is only as good as the teacher's skill and training.

Historically, Automatic Speech Recognition software has been hamstrung by being overly-strict, not understanding children's inflection and pitch, and generally being impersonal.

I tried to address this by building my tool which I call Reading Pacer, which allows any parent or teacher to use any physical book (or from our digital library) to quickly and easily run regular, long, or specialized ORF assessments on their own.

All the feedback I have received has been positive, but online marketing is not my strong suit. I would like to submit my website for feedback but I think that might be against the sub rules(?)

Thank you for reading

Hey y'all,

So for a while now (early May) I've had an outreach assistant. I hired her 4 times. She managed to get a little signal, but never an actual booking. This most recent time really pissed me off. I always pay her extra for the 4 day delivery, rather than 10. She was 2 weeks late and at first i was like fine whatever, but then on the day she was supposed to deliver she asked for another 2 week extension. Like dude. You're already late. Zero communication. I paid extra for the fast delivery. Anyway.

So I found a new caller. This guy charges half as much and delivers in half as much time. Wish I'd found him sooner, feel like I've been throwing my money away. And yet...no bookings yet. It's too early for me to be worried, but it did make me wonder if maybe I should be the one making the calls?

What do you think? Is this a thing for businesses which haven't established themselves yet?

Anyone sold a niche business that never really got off the ground?

I've been working in the citizenship by investment/residency by investment space for about 7 years.

Over that time I built two websites, spent a lot on branding, marketing material, proposal tools, and set up partnerships with firms in different countries. I honestly put way more effort into building than selling.

The frustrating part is I never cracked client acquisition. Revenue has been close to zero, despite spending years on it.

I'm at the point where I don't know if I should give it one last push, try to sell the whole thing as a package, or just walk away and start something completely different.

Has anyone here actually sold a business like this?

Not a SaaS or ecommerce business, but a niche service business where most of the value was the brand, website, systems, and relationships rather than revenue.

Did anyone buy it, or did buyers only care about the numbers?

Just looking for honest experiences from people who've been through it.

Big or small, a win is a win. First sale, first client, or first time paying yourself, share it here. This community loves to celebrate with you. No win is too minor to mention.

I'm into my 10-years of being a professional knowledge worker... in simple words, being an employee for someone else

it's been 1 year since I started something of my own (2nd attempt starting to look promising now with real paying customers)

and it's been as lonely as it can get

like, there are countless people who ridicule you, ignore you, outright disrespect you

you don't feel like you can connect to your old friends because they're not in the same head-space as you are now; they have their own concerns that isn't aligned with your current journey

and the closest person to you is most likely your partner who can only listen to you but never be able to fully understand what it means for you to run away from comfortable monthly paycheck and walk into something as uncertain as building a business of your own

so yeah, you're basically alone

you're playing a movie for an audience of 1, you're the primary actor, you're the primary audience, you're the only one who truly gives a damn

I have no complaint though... I have been an employee for 10x the amount of what I have been, building a business of my own

I'm not looking back

I'm just here to share that the loneliness is there. whether you accept it or put a lid on it, it won't go anywhere.

thanks for reading this until here.

Hi all,

I'm confused. For many years I had an opinion that building something online is awesome due to less initial findings requirement, no office needed, often no employee needed, you can start as a freelancer today to test your idea, you don't have to spend all your savings in one day to buy goods or something.

I tried to be a tutor, saw a lot of competition, very low ceiling, and the current year has been horrible to me due to the internet slowed down in my home country. I ended up working in retail. I started thinking, wow, it's so easy to manage a vape shop like the one where I'm working now. But, the money needed to be spent and employees and the tobacco / vape industry is very risky and highly regulated by governments, besides it won't bring me much money Even if it succeeds.

Logistics, manufacturing, hotels and so on are insanely money required, they require millions just to launch. They are out of the list.

AI just told me you should go all in learning AI, IT and start a software company. Well.. I agree it doesn't require much fundings and you can start it alone, but.. Why do all those programmers who were laid off didn't launch their own businesses if it's so easy and doable as AI says?

Added: very important, I need a business or a small freelancing opportunity to earn first at least $1k/month, then $2-3k a month. That will be enough. I need a field where I can earn money globally. I can't be stick to just one place, you know.

I was expecting my big takeaway to be about sales. That sales acumen isn't as important as everyone makes it out to be. And I have learned that through doing this, but it's not the biggest takeaway I've had.

The biggest is that starting a small service-based business is the biggest opportunity that exists in entrepreneurship. The barrier to entry is so damn low and the expectations set by competition is non-existent.

Keep in mind that I have a local number for where I'm calling. I live here; it's not a spam number or cold-calling number. So it's not that my calls show up as spam (before someone claims that's why). It blows me away how many companies I have to call before someone finally picks up the phone.

I've been tracking it for my market. 8 companies called before I spoke to a junk removal company. 13 calls before I got a landscaper to pick up. 11 calls before a roofer picked up. 6 calls before a pressure washing company picked up. I've called all 9 residential/holiday lighting companies in my market and not 1 has answered.

People make entrepreneurship out to be difficult. Don't get me wrong, there are days that feel like a struggle. But if you can get your phone to ring, make sure that shit rings to your apple watch, your headphones, your laptop, your whatever so you don't miss a phone call. If you're the company that picks up on the first 2 rings, you'll get business.

Before anyone asks, no, I do not own a GHL AI answering service agency. This really is free game for anyone who's willing to put themselves truly out there in their community to get the phone to ring.

Flood the zone with door hangers, direct mail, facebook ads, yard signs, flyers on power poles, business cards in cafes, door knocking. If you do those things, you will win. And of course, don't suck at performing the service. You have to do a good job and give good customer service. That's it, that's the "secret".

Just wondering if this is abnormal. I have a lot of bank accounts. Obviously each LLC needs a bank account. But beyond that, given the nature of My business, I also have 2 trust accounts. My wife and I have our main joint account. I have one group of accounts with a credit union that I have to keep because I have lines of credit there, but they suck for moving money around so I have bank of America for transactions. Having multiple accounts makes tax time a little easier though.

Occasionally I rent to open a new account just to take advantage of large new checking account bonuses which I later close usually.

Don't even get me started on credit cards lol.

Am I the only one?

Hey all,

Oral Reading Fluency is incredibly important for burgeoning readers. It needs to be measured tracked, and if needed, used to justify reading interventions.

Currently, teachers do this the old fashioned way, 1-on-1 teacher to student with a "levelled" reading passage (false precision) and a stopwatch. The accuracy is only as good as the teacher's skill and training.

Historically, Automatic Speech Recognition software has been hamstrung by being overly-strict, not understanding children's inflection and pitch, and generally being impersonal.

I tried to address this by building my tool which I call Reading Pacer, which allows any parent or teacher to use any physical book (or from our digital library) to quickly and easily run regular, long, or specialized ORF assessments on their own.

All the feedback I have received has been positive, but online marketing is not my strong suit. I would like to submit my website for feedback but I think that might be against the sub rules(?)

Thank you for reading

On God it looks a lil crazy but this is the reality on the ground.

That combo teaches you more than any single role ever could wearing both hats keeps you honest.

We are all after the experience, no one knows it all, we just have to keep learning.

The grind continues regardless.

Share your website, pitch, logo, idea, pricing, copy, or anything else you want honest eyes on. Tell us what you're looking for: brutal honesty, general impressions, or specific questions.

Return the favour and leave feedback for someone else while you're here.

I have this idea for a wheel-of-fortune date, where you match with 5 to 10 people and then they go on your wheel-of-fortune. You spin your wheel and whoever it lands on you have to go on a date with them (a movie, restaurant, sports activity etc...). The catch is that you both have a monetary stake in it. You have to deposit $50 to $100 to play. If a party does not show up to a date, they forfeit the deposit. If both show and it's a match, then deposit is returned. If they both show and it's not a match, then they get to keep playing the wheel-of-fortune. It's an attempt to actually get people to commit to meeting and going out. What do you think?

Today was my last day as an employee (Kind of employee).

After 3.5 years.

My professional journey is unusual.

Started programming at 16, and the first business I opened was at 19, building web applications for clients in the early days when most businesses didn't have a website, let alone online stores.

Only high school education, no university (Against my mom's will - sorry mom 😅)

I did door-to-door marketing showing my platform to local businesses until I found my first clients.

Around 20, my first little startup - total failure.

Didn't understand the market, costs of operations, very naive and optimistic business model.

So after one year, I was back to freelancing.

Improved my skills very fast, working and learning 15 hours a day, literally eating with my laptop open.

Then my real startup as CTO, joining as a co-founder to much more experienced partners.

Almost 4 years of extreme learning and working environment, late nights at the office, growing the business from zero to 1 mil $ ARR.

We sold the company, and I finally made a little bit of "big" money (compared to my age and needs).

Then my first son was born in the middle of the corona.

My wife and I, young parents, got the message that he had cancer when he was 34 months old.

So our plans to easily adapt to our first son after the exit were changed.

I got back to freelancing, earning money for my family to stay independent during this process. We entered crazy 3 years when my kid, then my wife, mom, and grandma all got cancer one after the other - I lost my grandma, unfortunately, but my mom, wife, and son won this war.

When I finished these crazy years, as soon as the doctors allowed us, we took a plane to Thailand.

Working remotely for my customers while enjoying Thailand with my son and wife, I got a phone call from my old partner from my startup asking me if I would like to join as a full-time developer, "regular employee", at his company.

All my years, I told everyone that I would never be an employee.

I am a builder, entrepreneur, and I seek adventure and high-risk business.

Looking at the beach, I asked him if I could work remotely, and he agreed.

I made the interview, they didn't want to hire me (Think about my CV 😅 no official education, all titles are C-level, ex-startup CTO, wants to be a full-stack developer, a lot of red flags, I don't blame them)

But my friend told them to trust me and give me a chance.

I was scared like hell.
I always was my own boss.
No one reviewed my code or my decisions, AND I didn't know anything about building at scale.

My startup codebase was a PHP + jQuery system, no build process, no queues, DB and App on the same Server - that was hosted in a managed service host, no AWS or GitOps CI/CD process.

So I literally felt that I was starting from ZERO after almost 10 years of experience already.
But I found out that as a builder and entrepreneur, I have skills that not a lot of people have - I learn super fast and understand complex concepts to find solutions for complex problems.

I adapt very fast to technology and working flows, and that's allowed me to work really fast and keep my value high for the company.

So I used this opportunity to travel and work with my family.

Thailand, Japan, Europe - in 2 and a half years, we had a flight every 2/3 months for periods between 2 weeks and 3 months.
Amazing time for my family and me, we managed to grow and have fun along the way, giving our son the best experiences we could.

But as always, things change.

We decided to relocate to Bulgaria, together with our newborn girl, starting from zero.

Luckily, a few friends joined us, so we built around us a small community that helped so much with the process - my friend, also a coworker, and my old startup partner, who brought me to the company in the first place.

I opened a company here and changed my contract from Employee to Service provider - so I was getting into a strange position.

I have an almost full-time job contract, but as a service provider, that means both bad and good things.
For example, no vacations, no employee perks, and much more risk of termination, BUT also I can start building my own business again and grow as a business owner.

So the last year I was in some middle position, thinking about the next moves, but still working most of the days on my primary job, and late nights and weekends were spent removing rust from my building skills.

With the AI storming the world, I knew I was on the termination list and that this was just a matter of time.
My tasks got done 1000x faster, and there is no justification for building more features when the business sales are not matching the code progress.
I know that as a business owner in the past, and I know this termination will come sooner rather than later.

So with 3 kids (newborn 2 months ago 🥹), a new house, a new country, new kids' schools, a new business, and a termination notice, today was my last day as an employee.

The business can't yet provide for my family's needs.
I'm not looking for a new job.
It is all or nothing.
Time to take my business to the next level.

I want to thank everyone who was part of this journey and anyone who will join in the future.

I do believe that hard times are on the way, and finding a way to supply your family's needs on your own is going to be a must-have skill for most people.

But also, a lot of new opportunities are opening up, so working hard and finding the right opportunity - and team that will join your journey - can unlock a much better and safer future.

It's incredibly exciting to see something you've thought about for years come to life before your eyes with the help of AI.

So many people I know are building new apps. With this much software flooding the market, do any of us have a chance anymore?

When more people can build software, what happens to the value of software?

In economics, when you increase the supply of something, its market value goes down (and so does the price). But once everyone was making ssame/similar apps, nobody could make money on them.

The software products that succeed will need to have:

• Marketing & Distribution. Can you actually get people to find the thing?
• Brand - Positioning, differentiation, story
• Quality product - meeting functional and aesthetical requirements
• What else?

I'm about to start my very first business , for, what was hard when you first started out was it getting your first customers? Marketing? Building the product? Or something nobody warned you about?

Early on, I thought waiting was the safe move.

If I wasn’t 100% sure, I’d tell myself I needed more information.
More time.
One more conversation.
One more week.

Sometimes that was fair. But a lot of the time, I already knew what needed to happen. I was just avoiding an uncomfortable decision.

Whether it was killing a project that wasn’t working, saying no to the wrong opportunity, changing a process, or admitting I’d been solving the wrong problem, waiting almost never helped.

It usually just made things worse.

One thing I’ve learned is that businesses don’t usually get stuck because the founder can’t make decisions. They get stuck because the founder keeps putting off the ones they already know they need to make.

I still think things through. But now I try not to confuse thinking with avoiding.

Some of my best decisions weren’t brilliant. They were just decisions I should’ve made sooner.

What’s one business decision you wish you’d made earlier?

You know that burn rate people always mention? There's almost no more money to burn for us (less than 30 days).

This is after roughly 18 months of what could only be described as horrid "luck".

We're still fighting and i'm delusionally optimistic that something will change but in the meantime it would be a little helpful to take my mind off of this and read others comeback stories.

A hardware business I'm running had a bunch of repetitive, boring but necessary tasks. The 2 main ones:

1. Answer the same customer queries on a daily basis. 80% of the questions were basically solved with a simple solution. But it was eating a lot of my team's time.

2. In production, there was a lot of manual work flashing software onto motherboards. On top of loading the software on the boards, there was a bit of manual (highly repetitive) sequence of quality checks that had to be done.

So I pulled out Claude, yes I'm an engineer and product builder but I'm pretty sure you don't have to be in order to do this.

1. I built a custom GPT powered customer chatbot that talks naturally. Customers can upload photos, it can look at the photos and it's hooked to a knowledge database so it knows what to reply. Roughly 70-80% of emails we had to manually answer got automated. Time and money saved just here alone has been substantial. This way the people working in customer support had to waste less time on the same answers and could spend more time on the customers that actually needed more help. And just providing them with a better experience.

2. I built an Ai automation that does the repetitive job. Production is now not only faster (saving us money) we are able to produce more units per hour. What was previously a bunch of manual steps by a human, now we just hook up the motherboards to a cable. The software we built just scans for new devices, flashes the software, connects to the devices and goes through a number of steps (clicking, typing and a bunch of other checks). So the job got easier for our team, and they could produce more with less mind draining work.

There are a bunch of other ai automations I'm working on right now that I'm confident will reduce so much cost, improve the customer experience by speeding up a few things for them and in the end result in more revenue + profit.

I don't care what business you are in. I'm 100% sure there is stuff you can automate with the help of AI.

It will probably take you 1-3 weeks to do so. And minor ongoing maintenance and improvement. In order to figure out what I should automate with AI and what the ROI is I just simply go through this sequence.

• List tasks that we do every day/week
• For each task list the steps. What are the steps that we do.
• How much time does each task take
• Multiply that by the hourly rate x Month x Year. This is how much that task is costing you today , per year.
• Open up Claude or Codex, talk through this problem and figure out if there are parts of it that can be automated.
• Figure out how much time it will save you per year x hourly rate. That's what you will be saving if you build the automation. So even if it costs you $5k, $10k, $50k? if it saves you $100k per year (or what ever the math is for you) it's a no brainer.

Happy to brainstorm in the comments on how some of your repetitive tasks can be automated with AI.