Ask HN: What would you do with this “zombie” startup?
3 comments
This sounds like two Point of Sale software companies I used to interact with.
PCAmerica sold themselves to a credit card processor that was then also acquired, and the POS software has been frozen in amber the last 5 years (with the same terrible bugs). Their market share has collapsed since then, as software support has been outsourced to India and they cobranded with Heartland Payments.
The other POS company is still struggling to survive, they have a couple large accounts but they are all using the legacy codebase built atop VB6, and their C#/Angular.js rewrite is still missing most of the features they had 15 years ago, despite 4 full time developers working on it since 2015.
Admittedly, the latter company seemed like a series of unfortunate events. They bet on Index Payments (Started by some Googlers, bought to be scrapped by Stripe which told grocers nationwide that they were going to brick their payments), did not chase large volume accounts that could have funded more developers & support, and inevitably missed the mark by rewriting a large application and halting forward progress.
PCAmerica sold themselves to a credit card processor that was then also acquired, and the POS software has been frozen in amber the last 5 years (with the same terrible bugs). Their market share has collapsed since then, as software support has been outsourced to India and they cobranded with Heartland Payments.
The other POS company is still struggling to survive, they have a couple large accounts but they are all using the legacy codebase built atop VB6, and their C#/Angular.js rewrite is still missing most of the features they had 15 years ago, despite 4 full time developers working on it since 2015.
Admittedly, the latter company seemed like a series of unfortunate events. They bet on Index Payments (Started by some Googlers, bought to be scrapped by Stripe which told grocers nationwide that they were going to brick their payments), did not chase large volume accounts that could have funded more developers & support, and inevitably missed the mark by rewriting a large application and halting forward progress.
What’s your market?
I decided a few years ago that it wasn't growing fast enough to be a "startup" and so I never raised money. Instead I handed the reins over to the team that was in place, and got a tech job, where I am pretty happy and well paid. I spend 10-20 hours a week on nights and weekends managing the business.
Since it was my own company, I took on some debt and liability to get it going, and I still backstop any financial problems. This has become exhausting and stressful, and I don't really have enough time or focus to solve these problems. I was often surprised by expenses that came in - I am more of an engineer / product person, and so I was never really good at operations.
I'd like to sell it or bring in a partner who could maybe infuse some cash and operate it better than me. I have tried bring others in, but haven't really pursued it much. It has some tech and IP attached, but not sure how much that's worth. I still believe it has the potential to be a nice "lifestyle" business generating a few hundred K a year in profit, but we never seem to get there. Also shutting it down would probably cost me a few hundred thousand in personally guaranteed liabilities.
Looking for perspective, sympathy or advice on what to do next here.