An exit is not universally defined as success. Success is defined by the person who builds the company.
>Success should be building and maintaining a business that can annually bring you in a ton of cash, keep you relatively sane, keep loads of people from your country's economy in employment and above all provide goods or services that will make someone else's life/work a little easier.
Selling my company allows me to do all those things (although my cash is coming in up-front, for the most part, which means I can likely grow that money a lot faster than I could have if I got it over many years).
If you just want to sell leads there are some basic lead distribution platforms out there like boberdoo.com. We built our own in-house. If you have a lot of custom stuff you want to do, find a CTO.
It doesn't say that at all. I said nothing about easy. I'm saying that as an entrepreneur you have to maintain the delusion that your company is likely to be worth a shit-ton of money. After all, if you don't believe that, what's the point of building it? (Assuming you don't want a small lifestyle business)
I disagree. Once you have already done it your likelihood increases that you will do it the second time around. You have more capital, experience, and connections.
You are right in the sense that before you start a business you are less likely to have multiple successes than you are to have one success.
100% right. Although a lot of the technology we built for our service providers was new, the business model was not new at all. There are dozens of leadgen companies in the home improvement space as well as dozens of lead management tools, but none of them are providing an integrated product that both sells leads to service providers and then improves the way they follow up with those leads (thus increasing their satisfaction with the leads, which increases spend and lowers attrition).
I started off that way as an affiliate, but eventually, when I launched LocalPainterQuotes.com, which a year later became CraftJack, we started selling direct to service providers and built a lot of technology that other companies were/are not providing to their customers. The revenue increase really came over 2 years as we had some revenue before we launched CraftJack, but it was still pretty quick growth and all bootstrapped. That's one of the things you can do in LeadGen easier than other sectors (bootstrapping).
Thanks for sharing that story. That's a big fear a lot of founders have when they are deciding if they should seek/take VC money.
As far as our team, we were small. CraftJack was owned by the first company I started, Tribe9 Interactive. I owned the majority of that, but I brought on a CTO a few months in to CraftJack and he has a share of Tribe9 and my first employee has a small share as well. But that was it. I was careful to get both of their approvals before taking the deal (although I didn't have to legally as I owned the majority), but I wanted everyone to be on board and would be happy with the move.
Also, the fact that they still own part of Tribe9 means they have equity in future companies we start or invest in (we already co-founded and invested in one called Mystery Tackle Box, http://mysterytacklebox.com, which is off to an amazing start growth wise). It was important to me to make sure everyone was game.
There is no formula for how to value a startup after one year. In our case, we had over $1MM in revenue and built some very cool technology that was new to our space. It all depends on the company, the team, and the situation.
Also, while the brand (CraftJack) was a year old, I had started some of the properties we used to generate leads 1-2 years prior to that so was able to build some revenue from there.