This size of company and mindset seems pretty well served by MicroConf [0], which tends somewhat to the bootstrapping crowd but is very much not the "4 hour work week" crowd.

... Is that what you mean by "optimize for lifetyle"? "lifestyle business" is used as kind of epithet in some circles, as an "othering" term to identify people who don't work as hard as they do, but the MicroConf audience has a lot of people who want to grow their companies as much as is reasonably possible, but with non-negotiable ideas about family time, taking actual vacations instead of working vacations, etc.

One of the creators of MicroConf also is one of the hosts of the podcast "Startups for the Rest of Us" [1], which I don't see talked about very much on HN but which is very much my jam.

[0] https://microconf.com/

[1] https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

Microconf is definitely more oriented towards smaller businesses than the previous commenter seems to be.

It depends on what you mean by "small." MicroConf focuses on SaaS founders who are, or aspire to run, 7- or 8-figure companies. We do also provide early stage education, but with the idea of folks building ambitious startups, though no in the traditional Silicon Valley Unicorn sense.

Yeah for sure. Going from 0 to 7-8 figures is the aspiration for people who attend, and what you've built is a great resource for that growth.

But the person we're responding to has already achieved that aspiration. What's out there to serve the incremental growth of people who are looking to go from 7-8 to 9-10 figures?

The feedback I've heard from people who've attended MicroConf multiple times tends to be that its invaluable content until you're above a certain size, and then the content becomes less impactful.

Do you know of any alternatives that are similar but not so focused on SaaS?

The almost exclusive focus on exit strategies makes VC advice mostly useless for many concepts, particularly those based around community or specializations. To even have a built-in exit strategy feels like the business plan equivalent of fast fashion, and that mindset is harmful to everyone except founders and investors. It really is absurd that there are so few resources available to startups with modest or long term plans, or those lacking the desire to minmax profit schemes at the expense of their customers.

> Promote employee stock ownership for American Mittelstands

This is crucial. Many bootstrapped companies don't offer much stock ownership from employees. Yes, they can pay a good salary, but these employees are laying down the business brick by brick, but never see a dime of the upside. Mailchimp comes to mind. I'm sure there are others.

This basically leaves stock ownership in VC-backed startups as a way to get rich quick (albeit with low odds): https://topstartups.io/startup-salary-equity-database/

In fact, Mittelstands will probably perform even better if they can figure out how to attract the kinds of talent well-funded startups do. And from there, it'll be a virtuous cycle.

Agree. In Germany, some Mittelstand companies do offer employee stock options which allow you to buy a certain quota of stocks per month at a pre-negotiated price which is typically much lower than market value. The idea is that over time, employees can choose to reinvest their salary into the company, thereby becoming partial owners.

Personally I do not think employees should pay money to invest in the company where they work.

Because if they do, then if the company goes bust they lose their job and their savings on the same day. See Enron as an example where employees were heavily invested in Enron.

And the company doesn't even need to go bust - a downturn in the stock price leads to some cutbacks and redundancies, and you're the unlucky one...

The first rule of investment is diversification, and keeping your salary separate to your savings seems like a good start.

By all means buy options, and sell for a quick bonus, then take the money elsewhere. If you can't sell the stock (company not yet IPO) then treat money spent on options as "lost"... In 99% of cases it will be.

I believe you're seeing things through a US lens there. Many of these small Mittelstand companies are incredibly durable because they don't have high loans and they don't have investors.

Also, the idea here is not that it's a great investment (although it usually is), but that it transfers power to experienced employees. Imagine if you and your coworkers owned enough company shares so that you could veto the CEO together.

Sure, if employees owned more than 50% of the company then they'd have more "seats at the table". In my experience the employee poll is negligible though from a "power" point of view.

My point I guess is that there's no materially different upside to owning shares where you work, or just shares outside. And shares outside diversify your income stream.

If there is a material difference in terms of power, well then I guess that's different.

Employee stocks are a suboptimal investment strategy. It is putting all one's eggs in one basket. If the company runs into difficulties, one's job is at risk and at the same time one's investments.

Sincere question: What benefit is there to owning equity in such a company in employee sized quantities?

Employee sized quantities should be much bigger at a Mittelstand company vs. VC-funded. You don't need thousands of people when you're going after 7-8 figure outcomes, which means each employee should be able to get better profit-sharing. You also are not diluted big-time by investors that can bully the cap table

Presumably dividends if the owner doesn’t just capture profits via inflated salary.

Maybe dividends, maybe cash-out if there is a change in ownership

Dividends?

Yes, I think this is one of the most important pieces to solve! There have been some approaches (profit sharing, etc) but I think there's room for a lot of improvement & innovation here.

> In fact, Mittelstands will probably perform even better if they can figure out how to attract the kinds of talent well-funded startups do. And from there, it'll be a virtuous cycle.

Perform better towards what end?

I'll second the lack of information about playbooks/ running a middle-class company. It's a bit frustrating that everybody assumes you want to follow the VC model. Probably the most common question I get is when I'm going to sell the company - not realizing that we're a profitable company that doesn't need an exit. I also think middle-class companies are under-reported on. I have to assume that there are a lot of companies like us but it's not as sexy of a story: slowly and steadily building a successful business.

Your story with IPinfo.io is profoundly compelling; have you written anything about your journey?

> "let's be ambitious and serve a large market and create the best products with great people, but let's run this as a marathon and not a sprint, and let's not risk everything on a big outcome"

This sounds so great.

Thanks! Yeah I have talked about it a bit - I should probably talk about it more :)

https://saasclub.io/podcast/ipinfo-ben-dowling/

https://codestory.co/podcast/bonus-ben-dowling-ipinfo/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r79AuXgTy-4

Probably a stupid question, but how does this work technically, how does one correlate IP addresses to geolocation?

Data sources that provide geo coordinates and ip addresses. E.g. an app that sells its analytics data and you have geo access turned on.

How is this legal? IP + location is public info like looking up property ownership in Cali? Can we opt out if our data was sold under our noses without consent?

Congrats on winning in this space btw, site is super slick!

> have you written anything about your journey?

Well, he can't yet, since it's still a going concern!

Isn't what you're describing just running a regular company?

No, I actually think it's much more closely aligned with a VC business than a regular business. It's just a more "regular business" approach towards it. That is, it's still serving a large market, creating a competative advantage (which "regular businesses" rarely have), has compounding growth - it just doesn't need to rush to make it all happen in a few years in a very high risk way.

"That is, it's still serving a large market, creating a competative advantage (which "regular businesses" rarely have), has compounding growth - it just doesn't need to rush to make it all happen in a few years in a very high risk way."

You've just described a number of regular business I know. The idea that they're not trying to create competitive advantages is...flawed.

Happy to have my flawed thinking corrected - can you share the examples?

I likely am thinking of a narrow set of "regular businesses" - what came to mind were corner shops, hairdresses, bars or restaurants etc. Even in those cases there are obviously large successful busniesses that do have competitive advantages - but I suspect they mostly get erroded away by competition rather than the business being able to sustain them, and high margins. I would love some counter examples though!

As an example, I would say Microsoft is a regular business. Sure, at this point they're one of the largest companies in the world, but the way they operate is still largely the same as it has been. It ticks all the boxes you described as well.

what is the competitive advantage of ipinfo.io?

Data.

This is a really incredible article about the economics of data businesses, if you haven't seen it: https://pivotal.substack.com/p/economics-of-data-biz?s=r

Same! I think the middle ground is somewhere between paying dividends or distributions from the revenue and most importantly, becoming comfortable with the idea and ignoring the “growth at all costs” mentality that people (and press) are so attracted to.

Where does this community exist?

> paying dividends or distributions from the revenue

Traditionally, isn’t this what a bonus was, back in the day?

this community simply does not exist yet in significant form. if you build it, they will come

by "it" I mean a sustainable company that pays dividends and isn't focused on constant growth

How about optmising for the customer. Where profits were required, and where there was legitimate competition, this generally used to be a necessity. The "VC backed advice" cannot be to optimise for the customer because it must optimised for the client investor first. This often relies on giving away work for free to non-customers and operating at a loss in order to achieve anti-competitive "growth" and "scale" (according to the "playbook"). The non-customers are the "product", marketed as advertising targets for customers. The race ("sprint") is to acquire unfettered access to the majority of non-customers by getting them to sign in to or otherwise visit cookie-setting websites, install mobile apps, and/or purchase always online computers with pre-installed apps and other surveillance built-in.

A sad casuality of "tech" VC mania is that small scale online businesses are passed over. Apparently internet-reliant startups must all subscribe to VC ideals because that is the only way they can be funded. Selling products and services for profit to non-advertisers is largely ignored as a viable option due the incessant focus on the www's feudual robber barons and the army of robot-like "tech" workers who ignore the lack of ethics and absence of long-term sustainability ("best practices") and want to be just like them. Few are interested in independently-owned, "Mom-and-Pop" online businesses, except for the opportunity to turn them into sharecroppers.

Serious question how exactly did you come up with the idea for selling what is essentially public available info then convincing people to buy it? Is it just rate limit removal. Why do people pay for what is essentially public info. I see john deer on customers list again just blows my mind. Out of all the companies in the world you guys were like yeah lets call john deer and see if they need better ip reg info LOL? I've used a lot of data broker services in my life and 9/10 times the area we were hoping they could provide better data is the exact thing we couldn't figure out and they are also missing it.

This comes from a place of amazement not some sort of passive aggressive thing It really astounds me just how bad a I am at judging potential markets. Maybe you could give hope to some of us soul sucked 9-5ers looking to escape. I'm really glad you figured something out.

We build our data sets on top of publicly available information (whois, BGP, rdns etc), but also combine it with lots of data we collect ourselves (ping & traceroute data from our probe network of over 100 locations). And then we do a whole lot of work with that data to produce our actual data sets. And there's a whole lot of work that goes into continuing to improve them, evaluate them, and ensure they're consistent etc. It's not easy!

And that's just producing the data. Making it available via a low latency and highly available API that handles over 100 billion requests per month requires some work, along with supporting data downloads in various file formats, and integrations into all of the various platforms that our customers want to use our data with.

And that's just on the engineering side of things!

But I'd say that even if our data was publicly availble (and to be fair some geolocation data is available for free - although it's generally not very accurate, and we also have other data sets beyond just geolocation) - there's still lots of value is making that accessible, easy to use and understand, and helping your customers get back to solving thier own problems while you worry about solving that piece for them.

We used ipinfo for a while because we didn't know much about the space, they had good SEO, the data appeared to be high quality, and it was easy to use. We were pretty happy with it!

We ran into some minor problems along the way, mostly around cost, and eventually had to switch to something else. We still don't know much about the space and the main thing that stood out about our new provider is that it is cheaper but the data seems to be of lower quality.

I can’t speak for ipinfo, but in comparing free vs commercial data only very basic geolocation by IP is public. This might be due to the IP block allocation (country/region/city) or handy things like ISPs that use geo names in the host name. Many other ranges are opaque blocks or allocated to something like a reseller, etc.

Getting finer grained data down to smaller groups blocks is harder and not public.

Packaging it up into easy to consume (normalized) is yet another layer of work.

That is why I love SmugMug.

>let's be ambitious and serve a large market and create the best products with great people, but let's run this as a marathon and not a sprint, and let's not risk everything on a big outcome

I like that. But is it doable or viable?

>> Totally agree with this article. It's not just about funding methods, but also playbooks for these types of businesses, and best practices.

I think the word you are looking for is called "business". There are tons of books for these types of businesses.

On the shelf behind me is E-Myth Mastery, 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Traction by Gino Wickman. You just have to look outside of tech. All of these books and practices apply to software businesses.

Yep, I have all those books behind me too :)

I do think there is space for a new category, or way of thinking about these businesses though. There's lots of great "regular / non-tech business" advice and books etc on how to operate in a non-VC way. But we're still talking about startups / tech companies here. So it's how do you marry the advice on operating a regular business with many of the dynamics of a VC backed business (that is, competative advantage, compounding growth, large market, high margins, attracting talent etc).

"millions in revenue and a team of over 20" are not "Middle class"...

That’s about the scale of a single Jimmy John’s franchise location.

Yeah, this whole idea is ridiculous and wildly biased by the incredible over-valuations of some of these startups.

This article is about re-branding the middle market, which is typically defined as $10mm to $1bm in revenue, as this middle class. (Less than $10mm steady-state revenues is typically a small or medium-sized business.)

what is it then? $ raised and trajectory are also part of the story.