My father owns a small payment processing company that does electronic processing of checks. One of his employees was busted by a federal task force for laundering a lot of money. The task force initially accused my father of being the ring leader. My father cooperated fully with the investigation, gave the task force emails, documents, etc. He had nothing to hide. They were still threatening him with prosecution so my father hired a very expensive attorney in D.C. and they eventually declined to prosecute. Total cost $20,000.
It's a lot of money but not $1.5 million. A large majority of innocent people don't end up at trial. Even a lot of the guilty people don't end up at trial. My dad's ex-employee became a witness for the government against the money launderers and avoided going to trial.
It's undeniably an awesome deal and I really like the website design.
I get a little concerned about the business model. Almost to the point that it would prevent me from hosting my code with them for fear of them going out of business or raising their prices later.
The current git repo for the commercial product I work on is 850MB. This is millions of lines of code + 8-9 years of development (migrated from svn at some point). That means we could be happy at the $5 month range.
If you get 1000 customers X $5, you're making $5000/month. I make way more than that as an employee.
Of course, you have people that will need more than 2GB but I think it's rare.
tl;dr raise your prices. I think it will help you get more business.
We created Legit Teams because we ourselves needed a service like it. As such, we don't view this as a business that's going to make us millions of dollars so much as a product that we'd love for both us and others to use. In turn, making enough money to simply handle our costs is really enough for us to keep this going.
tl;dr We're not raising prices or shutting Legit Teams down because it's not a business, but a tool that we use, and will keep using. Having others on board is a bonus! :)
What happens when you become large enough to justify an organization account at GitHub and it no longer becomes beneficial for you to either use or continue to operate Legit Teams?
We've put a lot of work into our system so far; I don't want or plan to switch over to GitHub for my private projects anytime in the prospective future.
My co-founder and I run under the philosophy that we create tools that we ourselves use. Legit Teams is no exception; we believe in the service and have no plans of discontinuing it.
I think the question was directed at the founders, not the users. What happens to the users of the service when the founders no longer have any use for it?
There are 30 developers on the project I work on. So if you get 1000 customers just like us. You're making $5000/month to handle the load of 30,000 daily users. Chances are you'll have to handle support too.
Not sure if we're typical or how much load 30,000 users would generate. Personally, I pull/push at least once a day. Just something for you to keep in mind.
I see your point. There's little I can say about handling 30,000 daily users along with support, though; what this really entails will only be determined by time if we get to that stage.
FYI, it only does reading but it's still very impressive. I've tried out the demo and it just works against small repos. It's very slow against larger ones.
Yeah. I've thought of a few things to do about that. For instance, we could optimize a repo to have pack files that work well for the browser. [edit] also there's a load of optimization that can be done on the binary parsing. I haven't even started that yet.
One thing about being an American living in another country has made me realize about the USA is that there are tons of police compared to other countries. This is a good and bad thing. It's a bad thing when you're being pulled over and harassed for looking suspicious. It's a good thing when you have bullies like this. If you call the police, they will usually respond promptly and eagerly looking to make an arrest.
Really? My observation about the US is that there's hardly ever a policeman around. Oh sure, they exist and they'll turn up (often en masse) when called, but otherwise they don't leave their cars. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as a policeman walking a beat, at least not here in California, which tends to increase low-level antisocial behaviour.
For instance, if you walk down University Avenue in Berkeley you'll see all sorts of people engaged in various levels of borderline-illegal dickishness -- blocking the sidewalk, harassing passersby for money, standing on a street corner with a ghetto blaster on full blast, whatever. Police officers go past in their cars but don't stop unless something serious is happening. If they were patrolling up and down on foot then they'd have the ability to slow down and talk to the troublemakers and hopefully move 'em along.
My observation about the US is that there's hardly ever a policeman around.
I live in Houston, and most of my interactions with Houston police have been negative. The one time I encountered a cop on foot, I was walking on a concrete wall about 3ft high in the early evening in an almost empty park with a friend, and he ordered me off of it. Another time, I was with a girlfriend who reported a hit and run, who even memorized the license plate and had visible damage on her rear bumper. The policeman insisted on getting a description of the car, despite my protests that my girlfriend doesn't differentiate that information. Nothing was done. I also remember another occasion where, despite my neutral, polite, and factual answers, the policeman kept escalating his hostility.
How well cops treat males in the US has mostly to do with their evaluation of your social class in the first second.
I think w3schools bashing is unjustified. It's good enough for most things. I use it all the time for a quick reference. I've never found anything there blatantly wrong or misleading besides the domain name.
Looking at the list on w3fools, it seems a little pedantic (aka nitpicky).
If you want to work hard, feel appreciated, and have opportunity, start or join a startup.
From my experience working at Microsoft, the author sounds clueless. Large companies will eat your soul because they like the souls of naive young developers who think they can get ahead by being smart and working hard at large companies.
Our brains can only superimpose our romantic fantasies over reality for so long. One romantic fantasy would be "I'm cool because I work at Apple". I can't see a talented person working somewhere for more than a year or two unless they genuinely were satisfied with the job and environment. Money isn't the only thing that motivates people.
A few years ago, I wrote a commercial plugin for a product and later sold the IP to the developer of the product I plugged in to. I'm intentionally being as vague as possible to remain anonymous.
My plugin was on the market for about 9months. In that time, my revenue was in the $60k range. The sale price was around 6x the revenue. However, it was spread out over a few years of me being employed by the purchaser. Of course, I got a nice salary in addition to the purchase price.
One thing that made my situation interesting is that a competitor of the product I plugged in to was interested in me doing the same thing for their product. Once they got wind of the negotiations, they immediately made me an offer. It turned into a bidding war for my IP/company.
My observations from what you've described:
you will almost certainly be expected to work for the purchaser since it sounds like you are the sole developer. They are essentially buying your services and the IP. So don't give them a reason to be wary of you working for them.
On what to ask for: Unless you have revenue, there is no way to objectively quantify at least a minimum value of your IP. There is an art to negotiation that is beyond this post but you've already got them to admit that you will make them millions. I think that is an excellent start. The best negotiators are willing to walk away from the deal. Determine a minimum you want ahead of time and then be prepared to walk away if you don't get it.
If you just want out then act accordingly. Give them a price that you know will keep them interested.
In my case, it took several months between the initial exchange of interest and serious negotiations to begin. They first contacted me in January, An email with an offer price arrived out of nowhere in May.
What I would do differently:
I would have asked for an earn-out instead of a flat price. I didn't know about this until I talked to a few other entrepreneurs. Basically, you give up guaranteed money for a cut of the action from your IP. You're assuming part of the risk. Big company with big marketing budget drives your product to success and you get a cut. It's a very common thing in product acquisitions.
When the competitor made an offer, I disclosed the other company's offer. I should have let them make me an independent offer. Even though there was a bidding war, the price stayed pretty close to the initial offer by the first company.
It's a lot of money but not $1.5 million. A large majority of innocent people don't end up at trial. Even a lot of the guilty people don't end up at trial. My dad's ex-employee became a witness for the government against the money launderers and avoided going to trial.