Earlier this year I failed to sell Baremetrics for $5m. But I learned a heaping pile of things from that and one of the biggest things I learned about was the world of asset sales and stock sales. This is about to get real nerdy but this is crucial if you're trying to sell a company. It could literally save you millions of dollars.

I failed to sell Baremetrics for $5m. While failure is 100% a part of success, it's only useful if you learn something. So, here are some of the things I learned from this little failure. Hopefully these are some things you can apply to your own company (present or future) that can save you a bit of pain.

In the past six years of Baremetrics' existence, I've received dozens upon dozens of emails from folks interested in acquiring Baremetrics. When you're running a transparent company that's growing, it just comes with the territory. Generally these conversations quickly fizzle once they realize I'm not even remotely interested in some quick, 1x revenue sale.

Intros, a product we launched to great fanfare three months ago, is being shutdown, having never made a single penny and costing our team months of work. https://baremetrics.com/blog/sunsetting-intros

Yesterday I wasn't feeling great, mentally. I had a level of anxiety I hadn't felt in a long time that started in the morning and really persisted through the night. I can't pinpoint it to any one specific thing. It was more the sum of a dozen small things. I felt like I hadn't been leading the team well through a big product change, parenting has been taxing lately, I was second guessing all sorts of life decisions, the things that typically bring me joy day in and out have just felt really uninteresting and on top of that, the weather yesterday was dark and stormy...which perfectly matched how my brain felt. https://baremetrics.com/blog/founder-mental-health

As founders, a lot of our identities get wrapped up in our companies. Certainly within our industries, but even to family and friends it’s how people know us. And over time, we sort of become our companies. Most founders or CEOs are the “face” of their businesses and eventually they’re inseparable. Being wholly consumed by your company hurts not only you and the people around you, but even the company itself.

A couple of years ago, we were in a hard spot. I had just realized we were mere weeks away from running out of cash and had asked the whole team to take a pay cut while we figured out how to get profitable. But in addition to cutting costs, we needed to figure out how to speed up growth. One of the things we did to speed up growth was figure out who our “perfect customer” was. We’d spent the first two years making some big assumptions about who our ideal customer was and who we should target, but had no imperial data to back that up.

When you’re just getting started, everything feels like a big deal. Everything. The tinniest things can turn in to huge showstoppers that drain time and, in many cases, money. But the longer you’re in the game, the more you realize how few things actually matter.

Where to publish something has becoming a difficult decision for a lot of businesses. You read so many stories about using various channels to distribute content and grow traffic, it's hard to know what does and doesn't work. Medium, in particular, has become a major player in the world of startup content, but is it really that great? https://baremetrics.com/blog/medium-back-to-blog

When building a startup, so much emphasis is put on “the product” or even “the customers”. Everything else takes a backseat. On some level, and at some points in a company’s lifecycle, this makes sense. Of course you’ll make sacrifices and you’ll have to work really hard and work really weird hours. But eventually, you’ll have to stop. The downsides far outweigh the benefits and the damage done to you and your team can be detrimental. That’s what I’m writing about to day. Managing the long term health of you and your team. https://baremetrics.com/blog/startup-health-well-being

Last week I hit some sort of boiling point with life and work. July was an incredibly stressful month for me both, personally and with work. Just lots of extremes, and it wore me down. Every single founder is struggling with something. Maybe it's big, maybe it's not. But there's always something. Even the most successful founders deal with this stuff and don't know what to do. Everybody’s winging it.

There can be some really exciting days when you’re building a SaaS company, but the large majority are a slog. Just one foot in front of the other, slowly trudging your way up the hill in the muck. The hockey-stick growth you’ve envisioned feels laughably far away. Amazingly, you are growing every month, but it’s just…so…tedious. This, my friends, is the long, slow SaaS ramp of death. It’s perfectly normal and par for the course for the large majority of SaaS companies.

Founding a company is hard. You’ve got an infinite number of decisions to make while simultaneously trying to catch lightning in a bottle with creating something out of nothing. It’s even harder when you’re doing it alone. Being a solo founder, in many ways, stacks the deck against you. You’re left shouldering the weight of every single decision and don’t really have any one to share it with. However, there are some ways to make it easier and, in many cases, it can actually be a major pro to start a company solo. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits as well as drawbacks so you can figure out if being a solo founder is right for you. Then we’ll tackle some ways to make being a solo founder a pretty great thing.

https://baremetrics.com/blog/most-startups-are-not-crushing-it Ask any startup founder how things are going and they’ll tell you it’s “going great”. They’ll talk about some new feature they’re rolling out, or a new round of funding. Or maybe they’ll mention how much user growth they’ve had or that they just got covered in TechCrunch. All signs will point to “crushing it”. But, for better or worse, there’s a very high probability that they are, in fact, not crushing it. The exact opposite, actually.

https://blog.baremetrics.com/startups-keep-it-classy-5bba13285cc6 Every day founders have an infinite number of tiny decisions to make and it’s easy to get decision fatigue. In a moment of weakness you may do something dumb that hurts you, your team, your company, your brand or any one of a thousand other things. So here’s an easy rule of thumb to help you when making decisions: keep it classy.

https://blog.baremetrics.com/the-startup-echo-chamber-is-making-you-deaf-771eec220181 Being an entrepreneur is a lonely place, especially if you’re the founder/CEO. Sure, you may have co-founders, but the reality is, there’s a lot of weight on your shoulders, a lot of pressure (self-applied or otherwise) to not drop the ball. To combat this, we’re basically permanently in “problem solver” mode. Everything needs a solution. Which is a natural fit because most entrepreneurs are self-taught and love to learn! Yes, it’s naive, but it’s also how we were able to make something out of nothing. We just figured it out. We’re really great at just figuring it out. But here’s the thing: solutions aren’t binary. Yet, we treat business problems as if they’re all just a series of variables that we just need to find the right combination of and BOOM! You, my friend, are living in an echo chamber and you don’t realize yet, but you’re deaf.

I’m done. I’m tapping out. I’m bowing out of the startup rat race. No, we’re not shutting down Baremetrics. Very much the opposite. I’m just finished subscribing to and following the traditional startup mentality as we build our company. https://blog.baremetrics.com/getting-out-of-the-startup-rat-race-66a5a0ca3055

There may be no topic in the world of business that spurs such impassioned responses than self-serve versus manual cancellation of a subscription. Let’s just say the word “evil” gets tossed around a lot.

What feature should we build next? Ain’t that the question of the year? While that next feature won’t save your business, it’s still important to actually improve your product and create more value for your customers. And figuring out what you should tackle next may be one of the hardest decisions you make on a regular basis.

What if you could put a system in place that instantly scores and prioritizes any marketing idea you had? You could focus in on exactly the strategies that are most likely bring you a return on your effort while minimizing costs and increasing impact. https://baremetrics.com/blog/marketing-idea-scoring-system