An entire industry of brokers exist to match online business owners with buyers and do these types of transactions regularly.
patio11 has used and spoken highly of FE International (you can see his blog or search HN)
But other brokers like e.g. Quiet Light Brokerage also exist.
It should be noted that these types of transactions have nothing to do with the typical Silicon Valley advice or narratives you'll read about acquihires.
If your product can't follow the GDPR legislation then I'm glad you don't allow EU residents to use it. Since you are most likely abusing the privacy of your customers.
While I'm a bit annoyed at the amount of paperwork and side systems that need to be constructed to ensure proper handling of personal data that I have had to implement, I can only see GDPR as something positive for the people.
I removed all my apps from the EU, and I will no longer publish any future apps there unless they become wildly successful in another country first.
My apps are tiny, free, and just not worth the hassle of figuring out what GDPR compliance is (even though they are likely GDPR compliant already since I don't store any info).
I think we're going to see a lot of small indie developers just not publish to the EU until it makes financial sense (which might be never). And that's exactly what happened here: Instapaper is a two-person team and they didn't have the time or resources to ensure compliance, so they just kept letting it slide.
I suspect we'll see much more of this to come for the EU.
I would certainly recommend reading up on the GDPR legislation. There are plenty of summaries that are good and covers the important aspects. Because once you understand GDPR, complience can follow naturally while you develop your application. Even if you dont serve customers in EU, GDPR complience will benefit non EU residents as well, since you have then implemented tooling for proper management of private information.
And if your application doesn't store data, then it's a one time cost essentially. Which is the time spent reading up on the legislation.
In addition, just noticed that Bonobos withdrew from the EEC due to GDPR
"Due to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we're currently unable to offer products and services to customers in the European Economic Community. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Why should EU residents not be allowed to decide what they want to use and not use? I'm not sure I understand why the EU makes laws that effectively decide what websites "free" people are allowed to visit.
For similar reasons that “free” people aren’t allowed to visit restaurants with health code violations.
People have to be able to make informed decisions. It’s hard to tell from the outside if a restaurant is safe, so we have inspections. It’s impossible to tell if a website is trustworthy with your personal data, so we have laws to try and ensure they will be.
Sorry, but that’s a preposterous analogy. Seeing targeted ads won’t harm me in any way. I don’t give a damn about this sort of tracking. You may feel differently, but I don’t, and am perfectly capable of evaluating the risks and benefits for myself.
What I do give a damn about is not being able to read some quality publications that rationally decided GDPR is not worth the risk.
Not a week passes without such a reminder that I’m now living behind the Great EU Firewall. I now live in a place where I need to use a VPN to access all of the Internet, for crying out loud.
And that’s not to mention the click through acceptances of terms an every fucking site, that’s “only” annoying as hell (which nobody reads anymore and thus GDPR changed exactly nothing in it’s supposed goal).
EU’s bureaucratic zeal made, via GDPR, my life worse, with no benefit, even theoretical, for me. So please spare us the lecture on how GDPR is good for us. It’s terrible even for consumers.
If you don't respect your users' privacy you don't deserve to do business in the EU. And make no mistake: whether you like it or not, that legislation - or something very like it - is going to jump the Atlantic sooner or later, so why not position yourself ahead of the curve instead of stropping off and taking your ball home?
There are side-effects I don't like about GDPR, like the endless bombardment of overwrought cookie consents on every site I visit (definitely something that degrades the experience of the web), but I do like the fact that my privacy has to be respected by corporations.
The cookie foolishness started as an a EU Directive that was adopted in May 2011.
It doesn't have anything to do with GDPR, but it's a fantastic example of (likely) well-intended European privacy regulation both is utterly useless and also stands zero chance of jumping the Atlantic.
There is a difference between respecting your customers’ privacy, and obeying the letter of the law regarding a set of artificial rituals surrounding your customers’ privacy. You can be completely compliant with the spirit of GDPR (e.g. by not storing any data in the first place), while also not wanting to spend the energy ensuring you are compliant with the letter of GDPR.
Tell that to all the companies implementing them. Now, if you click on the option to configure your cookie options you're presented with an often bewildering list of different cookie types that companies use for a variety of purposes. By either clicking "yes to all" (or similar) or selecting individual items from the list (or deselecting all) you're supposedly providing the informed consent that GDPR requires. Frankly I think often this is so confusing as to make a mockery of the whole process.
But they do: they are textbook example of unintended consequences of well-meant legislation.
GDPR is becoming that on steroids: the only thing that changed was for the worse: some sites outright banned EU visitors, the rest started using obnoxious terms screens that are even worse than cookie bars. Nothing really changed.
Anybody with half a brain could have seen this coming. But no, let’s double down on the same thing with GDPR. This time it will surely go down differently...
The issue is not whether you agree with having your privacy protected. The issue is deciding what constitutes "respecting privacy" for every single person in the EU, and threatening people with violence if they disagree.
You should let the user go through the entire process of creating the page before you ask for money. Then they have the extra desire of wanting their finished thing.
(I started building a site and put in a form, only to be told that was a paid thing. Closed the whole thing and immediately came to write this.)
I mean, you don't "spring it" on the user at the end. You say something like "try full features now for free! If you build something you like keep it for low low price of....."
I don't know that this is true for all users — there is logic to asking for payment details when motivation is highest, which is often before putting in a couple hours building a page. Putting down a credit card might also improve customer success, as that will help motivate the customer to finish on your platform, rather than forgetting about it for a month before going to Squarespace because they can barely remember your where they started building the first version...
Actually, I disagree with this premise. It would anger me more if I happily thought that I could do everything 'as is' on the free plan only to be hit with a paywall at the end to finish.
I would far rather see what I CAN'T do up front so that I can decide whether that feature is really worth $$$ to me, or whether I can work around it somehow.
Working hard certainly doesn't guarantee success, however it defiantly makes you luckier and exposes you to more opportunity. I like Kevin Systrom summed it up (not word for word):
Everyone gets lucky at least once a week. You might find a dollar on the ground, you might meet someone, be somewhere, whatever. What sets you up for success is:
1. Are you alert enough to know you're getting lucky?
2. Are you talented enough to run with it once you get lucky?
3. Are you resilient enough to stick with it once it gets hard?
Not buying a house may decrease mobility for some, especially single people. But folks who have spouses and/or kids tend to be more anchored to the community regardless of whether they rent. They have jobs and schools and friends that are hard to move away from.
Also, buying a house can be an opportunity itself. Although the new tax law makes it somewhat less tax-favored as an investment, it still offers the ability to escape capital gains taxation on up to $500k (married) of gains. There are other federal and state benefits that can make the overall purchase decision attractive.
So for some folks, yes a house can be an anchor. For other folks, they're already pretty much anchored, and the tax benefits can outweigh the downsides of incremental anchoring. Also, you can't get evicted...
> buying a house can be an opportunity itself. Although the new tax law makes it somewhat less tax-favored as an investment, it still offers the ability to escape capital gains taxation
This is what I was thinking. There's nothing stopping a person from moving and keeping the house and renting it out, often at a profit over mortgate+fees+repairs+etc.
I bought a house and moved out several months after purchasing it for health reasons. The house was an anchor, that I also feel held me back.
I had to take a number of jobs with higher pay, that weren't beneficial to my career. Almost every decision was can I pay for this house as well.
Outside of my special use case. It's an anchor point in your life. I like this job but it's further away from my house. I like this job but it's in another city. Etc.
In another universe you bought a house in an area that had a housing bubble and the price appreciated by 100% in a couple of years. You sold your house and retired in Mexico working on fun side projects.
You lose optionality when you commit your capital to an illiquid investment. That is, you no longer have the option to spend money on things which may have a higher ROI. Any type of commitment loses optionality.
There's a saying I like: "The harder I work, the luckier I get."
If we're playing a statistics game, the best way to pull ahead is to create the most opportunities you can have to be lucky. By working hard, you are providing yourself with more opportunities to be lucky. You can still fail and get unlucky, but that's an unfortunate part of life. Though it is pretty unlikely that you'll flip 50 tails in a row.
Disclaimer: I don't suggest using this strategy at the slots, your odds are just not good enough.
There a famous song from an old Soviet movie.
The song called "If you don't have an aunt"
"If you have no home
It won't be set on fire
And your wife won't leave you for another
If you don't, if you don't
If you don't have any wife
Don't have any wife....."
You are good at what you do frequently. If what you do frequently has low RoI in terms for satisfying your desires, you should stop doing it and do something else.
patio11 has used and spoken highly of FE International (you can see his blog or search HN)
But other brokers like e.g. Quiet Light Brokerage also exist.
It should be noted that these types of transactions have nothing to do with the typical Silicon Valley advice or narratives you'll read about acquihires.