tl;dr is i accidentally founded a startup, put zero effort into outreach or marketing because i prefer coding, yet somehow achieved modest (yet surprising given zero effort) growth and now someone wants to buy it. there's a poll at the bottom of the post asking if i sell and focus more on marketing on something new, or if i keep it and focus on marketing what I already have?
I love solving problems with code.
Many years ago I wrote localhost.run to solve a problem I had with code, and I found it useful so I threw up a very basic landing page describing how to use it and a $5 adwords spend for a few months. It organically grew from there. When I say organically tho, I mean like how plants grow on a vacant plot rather than anything planned.
Today I'm embarrassed to admit that I've put close to zero effort into anything except the code. Somehow people did find the service in the early days, and at some point when I discovered I had users I expanded it to offer custom domains under paid plans, and again people found it and I am now at almost $1k MRR, almost 1k signups a month (but poor conversion), and even more new user signups on my account-less free plan, but again I did zero outreach to market and achieve that beyond integrating with stripe, I did literally nothing except code to get there.
About a week ago someone reached out and offered to buy LHR for a decent sum of money, enough for me to live on for a year. This is a very nice someone with tons of experience both building their own products and acquiring and growing other peeps products. They've invested in and helped build some very well known products so this is a big deal. they took the time to meet me in person and to speak candidly about their journey, and to listen to mine. After poking around my signup numbers, connected users, etc, they told me that I've done a terrible job of marketing the product, that my MRR should be much higher. But I think they're wrong, because I haven't done any job of marketing at all!
They were super nice about all of this tho, critique and compliments, and they gave me advice for how I could grow if I chose not to sell.
I have two streams of thought from meeting this person.
First thought is, again, someone has found me and made an offer despite me putting in zero effort. Some would say this is lucky but LHR has been running in some form for almost a decade now, so it's not great that this keeps happening by accident rather than design.
Second thought is, do I sell?
My initial instinct is yes, I sell, and I use the money to bootstrap a new side project that I definitely certainly 100% will put time into marketing. Of course I'll need to solve a problem with code first, but this time I'll do the bare minimum and then give 50% of my time to the business stuff that I've so badly neglected on LHR.
But now, in the middle of the night, I've awoken with another thought. What if I'm keen on selling and taking this opportunity for a reset because a reset means I must solve a new problem with code? Because I get to delay challenging myself on the business side once more?
Is the right thing to do to keep LHR that is already coded, but code less on it and business more? Or sell and reset?
If anyone else who's similarly stumbled into a business almost entirely by accident like I did has advice I'd love to hear it.
Focusing on what we owe at present is much more worthy than starting it again from scratch.