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Topics for this week:

• divs.dollars

• Indie Acquisition

• Business is a video game.

• Founder Wisdom

• GME to the Moon Again

divs.dollars

Continuing to work with the one and only Divs client, a majority of their site is done!

I created their new website for free while I’m still ramping up, but they were also interested in a yearly maintenance plan.

After a brief call today, that plan should go into effect next week.

divs.design will make it’s first dollar in the next few days. Quite a milestone!

Indie Acquisition

A handful of tools I’ve mentioned and used before, were built by one person in particular, Tibo, an indie hacker similar to levelsio.

Tibo shows up in my X.com feed quite often with his hacking exploits, talking about what he’s working on and some of his advice for following in this footsteps.

This one caught my eye though, when he mentioned he bought a SaaS which, is something I’ve been considering as a long term goal. It was inspiring to see his breakdown of how he calculated the valuation of the business and his idea to make the deal beneficial for both parties.

I’m slowly familiarizing myself with the acquisition concept.

Codie Sanchez preaches often that deal making is a huge portion of buying a good business, so I’ll continue to keep an eye out for these break downs in the software space so I can have a good foundation of where to start when the time comes to make my own acquisition.

Tibo’s article about his acquisition was interesting enough that he got a subscription from me. Worth a look if you want to follow another solopreneur making considerable progress in his indie hacking journey.

Business is a video game.

I try to not talk about gaming too much in this newsletter, but it’s something I may have spent more time in than anything else.

Seeing this post from @mikekarnj, founder of Skillshare, grabbed me due to said gaming background.

Business really can be like a video game in terms of complexity, and I particularly enjoy a game that requires it’s own wiki to reference all the items and mechanics, so this is a mentality I’m more than happy to embrace.

Mike and Dan Reich, who’s had 2 businesses acquired by Salesforce, have an in-depth conversation on the game of business in the video from the post, and admittedly I haven’t gotten back to watching the full video, but I will next week.

Feel free to get ahead of me and learn about how to game your next business acquisition here:

Founder Wisdom

Taking a break from Alex Hormozi recommendations this week, let’s jump back to My First Million podcast instead.

Not as deep into business tactics with this episode, instead more generalities about being a founder of a business, and how to be successful, but this was a fun podcast with Sam from My First Million and Jason Fried - multiple business founder who’s been on the podcast before.

One quote in particular stuck out to me, though, from their conversation, and it seems to be a recurring theme from many other entrepreneurs:

“Cool wears off but useful never does”

It’s a simple and powerful reminder to not get caught up in branding and marketing, and just focus on building something useful.

If you create something people can’t live without, they will happily pay for it and probably tell others about it too.

Reminds me of this Naval quote:

The rest of the conversation with Sam and Jason is a quick listen, plenty of insights on good business practice, when and when not to introduce risk, and the importance of not holding on too tight to how a business operates.

Worth a listen if you have an hour and are considering the founder life:

GME to the Moon Again

Finance is something I don’t cover as much in this newsletter as well, but I enjoy the topic. It’s what led me to the idea of starting a business in the first place.

Because of that, I tend to keep an eye on big market moves - you know, just in case - so I remember watching the saga of GME back in January of 2021, debating if there was an easy play (which I never did end up making).

One of the main driving forces for GameStop “going to the moon” then was Keith Gill.

He found that GME was way over shorted by huge hedge funds, so he started betting against those positions and led others to do the same through streams on his YouTube channel.

Eventually enough other people bought enough positions that it forced hedge funds to sell their positions at a loss and indirectly helped a number of people benefit from the resulting meteoric growth.

It was a big enough event that the story was turned into a movie called Dumb Money, which is an entertaining way to try to understand exactly what was happening.

After that movie and all of the GME excitement, Keith went silent… until a few days ago.

He revealed on X that he’s been slowly buying huge chunks of GameStop stock again.

I was hoping Keith would make an appearance when I saw the thumbnail on YouTube, but unfortunately not this time.

However, Shaan and Sam cover the details and fill in some gaps with creative speculation as well in an entertaining conversation below:

And that’s it for this week! Business talk as usual, with a potential first payment, some indie hacking, gaming business, and some big financial moves.

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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