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Re:Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today by jborden13 on Thursday January 23, 2025 @02:29PM (#42807171)
When something consumes you so rabidly and ferociously for so long, and then is just gone (poof), it leaves you searching. Searching for recovery and meaning.

It's 4 years later, and I'm still searching...

Re:Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today by csallen on Thursday January 23, 2025 @08:07PM (#42809613)
My discovery having gone through something similar: If something made you happy and gave you purpose before, it probably will again. So just do it again.

The second time around, you may discover that finding success, getting rich, etc., wasn't actually the reason you were doing it.

Re:Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today by jborden13 on Thursday January 23, 2025 @11:50PM (#42810627)
Getting rich was never the reason. I was a solo bootstrapper who rarely got paid for a decade+. If it was about the $ I would've dipped week one of the startup.

My issue is product market fit. I've been building different ideas for the past few years, but traction has eluded me.

Re:Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today by csallen on Saturday January 25, 2025 @01:11PM (#42823356)
Out of curiosity, what have you built? Also, do you enjoy the process of building things?
Re:Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today by jborden13 on Thursday January 30, 2025 @09:01PM (#42884093)
I love building things - it's my passion in life. I loathe when I build something and it doesn't get traction. I'm all for learning, but I'm truly here for the traction. Here's a list of some things I built in the past few years:

- AI Agent Generator: Created no-code platform for customizable AI agents with a MidJourney & RAG/VectorDB document and crawled website integration.

- AI-Enabled Town: Crawled all of my tourist town's destinations, retail stores and their products and then tied them into a React Shopify sales channel. Built an agent to interact with and it links to products and locations as it chats.

- Job-Matching Browser Extension: Developed Chrome/Firefox extension to analyze job fit and generate multilingual resumes/cover letters in 26 languages.

- Job-Searching Agent: Developed MacOS and Winows Electron app to perform a number of searches on popular job website and stream a list of jobs and a % of how the user matches up, so they can focus their time applying instead of sifting through job descriptions.

Re:Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today by jacob_rezi on Thursday January 23, 2025 @08:29PM (#42809729)
Zuckerberg said something along the lines of if he would have sold facebook, he would have gone on to build another facebook Is that how you feel? Ive spent the past 10 years building my company, I dont feel like another venture could compare (for now)
Re:Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today by jborden13 on Thursday January 23, 2025 @11:42PM (#42810598)
I wouldn't, at least not in its current incarnation. I started mine in 2008, after a 2007 Supreme Court decision. For cpg brands, we built a SaaS for e-commerce dealer base compliance and management.

Ultimately, because competition eventually grew like crazy, I don't think the market timing is worthy of trying to rebuild it at this point. Maybe some analog for AI instead of e-commerce.

Oddly, after looking at your profile, it looks like I've been building the last few years in the same space as you. But product market fit has been elusive.