Reflections on selling my business
In 2021, I launched a fun little project: Icon.horse.
It started as many of these “micro-saas”-es often do (micro-software-as-a-service, if you don’t know) - I had a need for it myself, and I had built it and used it as a module in a few projects. As time went on, I came to a funny realisation: I wasn’t the only one who needed this.
The launch was super fun. I managed to get quite a few eyeballs onto it, and slowly a few paying clients started to trickle in. Before I knew it, I was actually profitable. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it left me a modest profit after expenses.
I was also working as a developer-for-hire, so it wasn’t about the money for me - I realised I genuinely enjoyed running the business. Interacting with clients, solving some issues of growth, and writing promotional content seemed like a fun time for me.
But, February 2022 had a little surprise in store: the war in my homeland started. It was a very painful moment for me, and one that sent me into a tailspin and a burnout. I looked hard at my life, including what I was doing for work. This raw, visceral moment hit so close - and I started asking myself, what the hell am I doing with my life?
At the time, I was working a freelance gig with a friend of mine, and I simply couldn’t concentrate on the work anymore. And, my little icon business seemed like something off the side of my desk. It seemed like such tedium, being the king of this tiny, pointless niche. Some of the things I had enjoyed, like dealing with clients, working on scaling it, and making content - it seemed like a terrible bore in my new head space.
As if the universe could somehow feel my mental state, a few months later, I was contacted by Third South Capital - a small tech company who seemed interested in buying up projects like mine. Without much ado, I sold it to them, and they run it to this day.
I busied myself with other things. I started a documentary Youtube channel - it was going fairly decently, with me getting a (modestly) viral video which got 50k+ views, and not long after, I was over the 1,000 subscribers threshold for monetisation. It was fun to focus on storytelling, and playing internet detective to do the actual research.
However, as I had launched Icon.horse, I had tied some of my personal identity to it online. It wasn’t unusual to still see me listed as associated with the project, and as such, I got quite a few emails from various parties about it. I forwarded all of them to the new owners, of course, but for a time, potential clients would reach out to me about it. Among them was a decently large company, who would be potentially serving millions of icons every month within their product. For my little project, this was a big fish! They could single-handedly take the product from making a few dozen bucks to actual ramen profitability.
Why did I sell this thing, I asked myself, with a pang of regret. I thought about how that money would be a really nice little boost to my family - a vacation fund, something to contribute to savings every month, maybe even investment capital we could have used.
But no, I sold the thing! Idiot!
It took a long time to shake that feeling. Instead of remembering the feelings that drove me to sell it in the first place, I remembered running it with rose-tinted glasses on.
There’s a rather amusing paradox in the world of indie developers - while most projects don’t make any money, most influencers in the space talk about the problems of having to scale up their business to accomodate more users. So, if I measured success as having a decently profitable product, I truly was Suffering from Success!
I am not even big on regret - I’ve never been one to navel-gaze at my own perceived mistakes or missed opportunities. I knew it was wrong to think this way, but it was like a little floater in my eye, just at the edge of my vision - always there, but elusively impossible to dispose of.
I’m not going to lie - it took me a while to get over it. And the way I did was by focusing on today instead. Instead of sitting around and feeling this way, I decided I needed to move on. Moving on, many people talk about it when giving others advice, but not all of those people have actually felt the feeling of doing so.
Moving on is not starting again. In my case, it was not building a new product in the hopes of recreating what I thought I had. That would only prolong the feeling when inevitably, the new thing doesn’t quite measure up to the old. Moving on is acceptance of the present. It’s putting the baggage of yesterday down, and walking further down the road into the future.