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AMA - I built a software company worth 8 figures

Ravens_Shadow

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I've been wanting to do an AMA (Ask me anything) for a while. I've built a desktop software company worth 8 figures, but I'm aiming for $1 billion, not to be a unicorn, but just because I think its the natural progression of where I'm headed. I started the company in 2016 and I have 15 employees and I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers. In MJ's own words he thinks that my company will be the first 9 figure (hopefully 10 though) exit on the forum. I built everything from the ground up on the business end by myself. I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity. I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere. We also follow profit first accounting methods and do quarterly dividends. I don't want to publicly name the company here but I'm happy to answer general business questions or give advice on situations you may be in.

I don't really believe in outsourcing cheap labor or paying/treating employees like dispensable objects. Everyone in my company makes a minimum of $80,000 a year, even if in their country it's perfectly acceptable that they're paid a fraction of what we pay them. I believe in treating both customers and employees as well as I possibly can in an effort to retain their strong talents.

Ask me anything about:

  • Managing employees and building a team
  • Subscription and permanent license based software
  • Bootstrapping your business & working on the biz while you have a day job
  • Dividend distributions and taking money out of your business
  • Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)
  • General business advice, mindset, etc
  • Anything that you feel you want to know about someone who's gotten as far as I have



If you know the company I run or my industry, please do not mention it in this thread. It is irrelevant, and if anything it's a harder industry to be in than most.
 
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Last edited:

doster.zach

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Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)

How do you protect your IP? I'm not sure of the specifics of your business, but what prevents someone from using your source code and releasing an open-source / competing brand?
 

Ravens_Shadow

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How do you protect your IP? I'm not sure of the specifics of your business, but what prevents someone from using your source code and releasing an open-source / competing brand?
We obfuscate our code, but no matter what you do in the end, the software is still crackable and there's no way to prevent cracks. We set up a honeypot when we launched the website to rank #1 in google for cracks for our software so that we can try to convert some users looking for that sort of thing. In terms of source code, theres no way anyone could get that unless it was leaked by our team, but I have doubt's it'd happen. There's a lot more to having a successful company than just having a competing brand or product. It's a LOT of work that most aren't prepared to do.
 
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doster.zach

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It's a LOT of work that most aren't prepared to do.

Amen!

I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere.

Obviously you didn't start with million dollar contracts, but how did you start out with sales? Did you go direct to consumer or still do B2B?
 

Ravens_Shadow

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How long did you bootstrap for and how did you manage life challenges during this time, like staying healthy, balancing family/friends, and burnout.
During the bootstrap phase I had a hard time managing any of that because I was working a 40 hour day job too. But truth be told after the boostrap phase, I got divorced during this time, partially due to the biz, partially do to other things. Sometimes you're just dealt unfortunate cards, but you've gotta keep going. During the boostrap phase, I poured all spare energy into the business. I do regret letting other things slide, but at the very least I tried to get out daily and exercise and eat well. I never cheaped out on food as it was what gave me my energy. I bootstrapped for 3 years.

Obviously you didn't start with million dollar contracts, but how did you start out with sales? Did you go direct to consumer or still do B2B?

We did both B2B and direct to consumer. To start out with though, we did some pre-sales to major companies in an effort to gain traction. We utilized social media pretty heavily and even to this day we focus completely on organic growth and don't do much outreach. 33% of our current revenue is consumers, 66% is b2b.
 
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I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity.
How did you choose your partner? Did you already know the person? Was it someone who could run the technical side of building a software product? Did you have a written agreement to deter your partner from running away with your idea?
 
Last edited:

joshuajwittmer

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What sort of education and work background did you have before building your business? Had you tried other business ventures?
 
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Christopher104

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I've been wanting to do an AMA (Ask me anything) for a while. I've built a desktop software company worth 8 figures, but I'm aiming for $1 billion, not to be a unicorn, but just because I think its the natural progression of where I'm headed. I started the company in 2016 and I have 15 employees and I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers. In MJ's own words he thinks that my company will be the first 9 figure (hopefully 10 though) exit on the forum. I built everything from the ground up on the business end by myself. I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity. I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere. We also follow profit first accounting methods and do quarterly dividends. I don't want to publicly name the company here but I'm happy to answer general business questions or give advice on situations you may be in.

I don't really believe in outsourcing cheap labor or paying/treating employees like dispensable objects. Everyone in my company makes a minimum of $80,000 a year, even if in their country it's perfectly acceptable that they're paid a fraction of what we pay them. I believe in treating both customers and employees as well as I possibly can in an effort to retain their strong talents.

Ask me anything about:

  • Managing employees and building a team
  • Subscription and permanent license based software
  • Bootstrapping your business & working on the biz while you have a day job
  • Dividend distributions and taking money out of your business
  • Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)
  • General business advice, mindset, etc
  • Anything that you feel you want to know about someone who's gotten as far as I have



If you know the company I run or my industry, please do not mention it in this thread. It is irrelevant, and if anything it's a harder industry to be in than most.
With so many third world programmers like people on freelance who will design and create things for a hundred bucks, how did you seperate yourself from that level of competition?
 

joshuajwittmer

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woken

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If you could send a message back in time to your bootstrapping self, what would you say?
Here I am, because I have to address this.

How on Earth does this help you? Or how it would’ve helped him ?

I believe these kind of questions are exactly what successful people are being asked which have no F*cking value for anyone yet we fill the need for consumption.


The guy/girl is looking for a billion dollar exit and that’s what you’re asking?

I have no questions. I’m grateful I get to experience this through the forum.

Thank you @Ravens_Shadow
 

CaptainAmerica

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How hard was it to switch from regular accounting to Profit First? Or did you start out that way?

Do you hire pen testers? What's been your experience with them, if so?

I used to work for a company that would rank our success partially by how fast the Chinese hackers put out a counterfeit. What negative things do you use to gage progress?

As someone in the bootstrap phase again, it's heartening to hear that you did it for 3 years. I'm hoping for less, of course, but I think the big lesson in perseverance needs to be shouted out.
 
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joshuajwittmer

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Here I am, because I have to address this.

How on Earth does this help you? Or how it would’ve helped him ?

I believe these kind of questions are exactly what successful people are being asked which have no f*cking value for anyone yet we fill the need for consumption.


The guy/girl is looking for a billion dollar exit and that’s what you’re asking?

I have no questions. I’m grateful I get to experience this through the forum.

Thank you @Ravens_Shadow
Hey woken, thanks for your response.

Ravens_Shadow said that he regretted letting some things slide. I want to know what he would do differently. The question is valuable because everyone makes mistakes. We can learn from the things ravens shadow did right, and the things he would do differently. Mistakes can be valuable learning opportunities.

And THANK YOU Ravens_Shadow for putting yourself out here and offering to help us to learn from your success. Mahalo!

Josh
 
Last edited:

jdm667

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Congrats @Ravens_Shadow , and thanks for posting this.

There are no-code options out there for building software - do you think it is worthwhile to use them to create a prototype, or is it more trouble than it's worth in the long run when you need more customization?
 

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I've been wanting to do an AMA (Ask me anything) for a while. I've built a desktop software company worth 8 figures, but I'm aiming for $1 billion, not to be a unicorn, but just because I think its the natural progression of where I'm headed. I started the company in 2016 and I have 15 employees and I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers. In MJ's own words he thinks that my company will be the first 9 figure (hopefully 10 though) exit on the forum. I built everything from the ground up on the business end by myself. I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity. I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere. We also follow profit first accounting methods and do quarterly dividends. I don't want to publicly name the company here but I'm happy to answer general business questions or give advice on situations you may be in.

I don't really believe in outsourcing cheap labor or paying/treating employees like dispensable objects. Everyone in my company makes a minimum of $80,000 a year, even if in their country it's perfectly acceptable that they're paid a fraction of what we pay them. I believe in treating both customers and employees as well as I possibly can in an effort to retain their strong talents.

Ask me anything about:

  • Managing employees and building a team
  • Subscription and permanent license based software
  • Bootstrapping your business & working on the biz while you have a day job
  • Dividend distributions and taking money out of your business
  • Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)
  • General business advice, mindset, etc
  • Anything that you feel you want to know about someone who's gotten as far as I have



If you know the company I run or my industry, please do not mention it in this thread. It is irrelevant, and if anything it's a harder industry to be in than most.
Congrats @Ravens_Shadow , I have no doubt you'll accomplish your goal and hit the 1 billion mark.

Thanks for giving back and providing an opportunity to answer questions.

1. What's the best way you've been able to handle customer churn in your subscription business?

2. How do you find 15 great people to work with you, what's your hiring/employee acquisition strategy if you don't mind sharing?

3. What's the bottleneck stopping you right now from reaching $1B?

3.
 
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Ravens_Shadow

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How did you find product/market fit? did you go launch a MVP in the beginning?
I was already the target customer in my market and I knew it was going to be a hit from the moment I thought of the idea. I think this is ultimately very rare and that finding a product market fit that good and it isn't going to be the case for most products. I had a lot of conviction that this was going to be a hit IF I could cross the immense chasm of what we had to build technically. We launched a pre-MVP out of desperation (contracts ending, running out of money back in 2019, etc) and even that outperformed our expectations despite how bad it was in retrospect. But the thing to realize is that at the time it was the coolest thing people in our industry had seen in many years. We wanted to do our full MVP, but we just ran out of time. Launching way too early was a good thing though ultimately.
How did you choose your partner? Did you already know the person? Was it someone who could run the technical side of building a software product? Did you have a written agreement to deter your partner from running away with your idea?

I met them on discord via a programming server I was part of. I saw their work and figured I should ask them to join me. I cold approached them and initially they told me they didn't want anything to do with it. Almost a year later they saw I was still trying to launch the business and decided to join me, thankfully. I was never scared of someone running away with the idea because most programmers by default aren't even thinking about running a business anyway.

What sort of education and work background did you have before building your business? Had you tried other business ventures?

I dropped out of college twice. I have tried other business ventures and failed. I did end up working a full-time job in my industry while building my company to get inside knowledge on how I could apply my software to the task at hand.

If you could send a message back in time to your bootstrapping self, what would you say?

Don't stress so much as most of it was unwarrented. Be more empathetic to the people around you.

Did you decide at some point to leave the day job and go 100%? If yes, at which point? how did your decision process look like?

I did decide at one point to leave the day job. As soon as the business could pay my same salary I left. Unfortunately as soon as I left sales dropped and we had to struggle to release our pre-mvp like I mentioned above. It was a stressful month :)

With so many third world programmers like people on freelance who will design and create things for a hundred bucks, how did you seperate yourself from that level of competition?

I didn't look for third world programmers to begin with. I looked for high quality programmers that had a solid trackrecord (in my case seeing their posts throughout the years on discord by looking at their post history). By reading their post history I could see how they interacted with others and if they were mature. Worked out great.

How hard was it to switch from regular accounting to Profit First? Or did you start out that way?

Do you hire pen testers? What's been your experience with them, if so?

I used to work for a company that would rank our success partially by how fast the Chinese hackers put out a counterfeit. What negative things do you use to gage progress?

As someone in the bootstrap phase again, it's heartening to hear that you did it for 3 years. I'm hoping for less, of course, but I think the big lesson in perseverance needs to be shouted out.

It was a easy switch as I wanted money, and taking profits *first* made a whole lot of sense to me. I ended up hiring a profit first accounting firm too.

Not sure what a pen tester is, so probably not.

Negative things we use to guage progress: Competitors stealing features, cracked versions of our software existing.

Perseverance is a major key here, this journey is HARD.


Congrats @Ravens_Shadow , and thanks for posting this.

There are no-code options out there for building software - do you think it is worthwhile to use them to create a prototype, or is it more trouble than it's worth in the long run when you need more customization?
No-code never could have been used to build what we did. Even today if i wanted to build a web app or something I would want us to build it with our own code from scratch. Then again, we had no choice in our case but to do it from nothing and with pure code.

Congrats @Ravens_Shadow , I have no doubt you'll accomplish your goal and hit the 1 billion mark.

Thanks for giving back and providing an opportunity to answer questions.

1. What's the best way you've been able to handle customer churn in your subscription business?

2. How do you find 15 great people to work with you, what's your hiring/employee acquisition strategy if you don't mind sharing?

3. What's the bottleneck stopping you right now from reaching $1B?

3.

1. Provide a good enough product that has enough lasting value and updates to prevent churn. Also good customer support reduces churn, we're at 5% or so.

2. Discord (or finding good programmers I admired on twitter) is how I found almost all of my people. After the initial crew was formed, they had solid recommendations and we went from there. I don't have much more of a strategy other than that. When hiring people we're up front with what we do and don't provide. I.e work from wherever you want, but no health insurance. We also list salaries on our postings and have unlimited vacation days. It's straight forward and I haven't had many issues yet. A few problem employees but they get put out quickly.

3. We don't have enough products in our suite of tools yet. Only a matter of time though. We also don't have enough infrastructure to handle things like customer support for something that large. I don't know, I'm still struggling to get to 9 figures in valuation.. $1bn is still a decade away.
 
Last edited:

Ravens_Shadow

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@Pharez Couldn't quote you properly, to answer your question I initially did 80/20 but eventually moved down to 60/40 (60 to me) and then from there me and my partner diluted equally as we brought other employees on. If anyone leaves the company, the company has sole rights to buy the equity back as we don't want any equity holders with no current skin in the company.
 

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building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere.
Congratulations @Ravens_Shadow! And thanks so much for sharing your experience. When seeking to create an intellectual property, did you start with a problem that you wanted to solve, or did you first investigate software patents that had already been issued and look for opportunities to improve on what was already available?
 
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Ravens_Shadow

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Congratulations @Ravens_Shadow! And thanks so much for sharing your experience. When seeking to create an intellectual property, did you start with a problem that you wanted to solve, or did you first investigate software patents that had already been issued and look for opportunities to improve on what was already available?

Patents for software are almost useless in my opinion. When speaking of IP i really mean our product in general. It was something that hadn't been done before in the way we did it. I started with a gigantic problem I wanted to solve and I don't know why anyone would do anything other than that. I knew the problem, I formulated a hypothesis on how to solve that, I built a crude prototype myself and then showed it to people I wanted to bring onboard. They eventually agreed to build it for me for equity and here we are making more money that we thought we could.
 

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I've been wanting to do an AMA (Ask me anything) for a while. I've built a desktop software company worth 8 figures, but I'm aiming for $1 billion, not to be a unicorn, but just because I think its the natural progression of where I'm headed. I started the company in 2016 and I have 15 employees and I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers. In MJ's own words he thinks that my company will be the first 9 figure (hopefully 10 though) exit on the forum. I built everything from the ground up on the business end by myself. I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity. I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere. We also follow profit first accounting methods and do quarterly dividends. I don't want to publicly name the company here but I'm happy to answer general business questions or give advice on situations you may be in.

I don't really believe in outsourcing cheap labor or paying/treating employees like dispensable objects. Everyone in my company makes a minimum of $80,000 a year, even if in their country it's perfectly acceptable that they're paid a fraction of what we pay them. I believe in treating both customers and employees as well as I possibly can in an effort to retain their strong talents.

Ask me anything about:

  • Managing employees and building a team
  • Subscription and permanent license based software
  • Bootstrapping your business & working on the biz while you have a day job
  • Dividend distributions and taking money out of your business
  • Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)
  • General business advice, mindset, etc
  • Anything that you feel you want to know about someone who's gotten as far as I have



If you know the company I run or my industry, please do not mention it in this thread. It is irrelevant, and if anything it's a harder industry to be in than most.
I don't have any questions for now but thanks for doing this
 

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I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity.
1. From the number of people you identified, who had the specific skills needed to start & run the company; how did you decide who should fill the seat of cofounder? Was it based on the chunk of work the particular individual was going to be doing for the company?

2. Must equity be 50/50 between founder and cofounder?

3. Is 2% - 5% equity okay for an initial employee or should it be more or less?

Thanks again.
 
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Great thread, I just have one main questions regarding your technical background.

You mentioned you don't code but at the same time you seem to able to understand what makes a good programmer/understand what programmers are talking about in a discord?

How would you rate your technical ability? And do you believe having a solid technical background is needed for software founders?

Reason I ask is because I sell database software to the techiest of IT departments without any real deep understanding of how our company's product works. I just know the problem customers have and how our product solves it, but if I were to go out and build a duplicate product I wouldn't know where to start in terms of what coding language experts I need to hire, what infrastructure I need to even build it on etc.
 

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I've been wanting to do an AMA (Ask me anything) for a while. I've built a desktop software company worth 8 figures, but I'm aiming for $1 billion, not to be a unicorn, but just because I think its the natural progression of where I'm headed. I started the company in 2016 and I have 15 employees and I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers. In MJ's own words he thinks that my company will be the first 9 figure (hopefully 10 though) exit on the forum. I built everything from the ground up on the business end by myself. I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity. I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere. We also follow profit first accounting methods and do quarterly dividends. I don't want to publicly name the company here but I'm happy to answer general business questions or give advice on situations you may be in.

I don't really believe in outsourcing cheap labor or paying/treating employees like dispensable objects. Everyone in my company makes a minimum of $80,000 a year, even if in their country it's perfectly acceptable that they're paid a fraction of what we pay them. I believe in treating both customers and employees as well as I possibly can in an effort to retain their strong talents.

Ask me anything about:

  • Managing employees and building a team
  • Subscription and permanent license based software
  • Bootstrapping your business & working on the biz while you have a day job
  • Dividend distributions and taking money out of your business
  • Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)
  • General business advice, mindset, etc
  • Anything that you feel you want to know about someone who's gotten as far as I have



If you know the company I run or my industry, please do not mention it in this thread. It is irrelevant, and if anything it's a harder industry to be in than most.
I've been wanting to do an AMA (Ask me anything) for a while. I've built a desktop software company worth 8 figures, but I'm aiming for $1 billion, not to be a unicorn, but just because I think its the natural progression of where I'm headed. I started the company in 2016 and I have 15 employees and I've never taken on investor money despite rejecting quite a few offers. In MJ's own words he thinks that my company will be the first 9 figure (hopefully 10 though) exit on the forum. I built everything from the ground up on the business end by myself. I brought on my initial founding partner with equity and a few initial employees with equity. I've had experience negotiating a multi-million dollar contract and building an entire IP from nothing which has seriously upset an industry as we came out of nowhere. We also follow profit first accounting methods and do quarterly dividends. I don't want to publicly name the company here but I'm happy to answer general business questions or give advice on situations you may be in.

I don't really believe in outsourcing cheap labor or paying/treating employees like dispensable objects. Everyone in my company makes a minimum of $80,000 a year, even if in their country it's perfectly acceptable that they're paid a fraction of what we pay them. I believe in treating both customers and employees as well as I possibly can in an effort to retain their strong talents.

Ask me anything about:

  • Managing employees and building a team
  • Subscription and permanent license based software
  • Bootstrapping your business & working on the biz while you have a day job
  • Dividend distributions and taking money out of your business
  • Building a successful software company, even if you can't code (I can't)
  • General business advice, mindset, etc
  • Anything that you feel you want to know about someone who's gotten as far as I have



If you know the company I run or my industry, please do not mention it in this thread. It is irrelevant, and if anything it's a harder industry to be in than most.
Congratulations. I'm Isaac living in Africa, I have a master's degree in software engineering. I want to become an entrepreneur but I don't know where to start. What advice can you give me?
 

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Nov 23, 2020
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Patents for software are almost useless in my opinion.
@Ravens_Shadow Thanks for responding to all those rapid-fire questions. Just to clarify: Even though they’re almost useless in your opinion, you still have a patent, right? Almost useless, but not completely useless?

Thanks,

Josh
 
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joshuajwittmer

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Nov 23, 2020
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There's a lot more to having a successful company than just having a competing brand or product. It's a LOT of work that most aren't prepared to do.
What would you say are the most important keys to your success in terms of preparing yourself and doing the work that needs to be done? Thanks again.

Josh
 

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