My first corporate acquisition! Idea to 7-figure exit in just 8 months.

Launched a "contextual deals" app called Clipless for Android which pulls deals from over 2,000 data sources and delivers deal notifications automatically when you enter a merchant that's offering one, using a proprietary low-power geolocation algorithm which all but eliminates battery consumption.

Featured twice on TechCrunch (1, 2), resulting in nearly 10,000 downloads in the span of a week.

The backend, an aggregation engine running on a self-managed load-balanced Tomcat cluster, didn't so much as slow down even when being hit with nearly 1,000 requests per second. (I scratch-build all of my production environments for this reason and because it takes me very little time).

This popularity in turn led to a swift acquisition by 8coupons, one of our key data sources. I stayed on as 8coupons' Head of Mobile for the next 3 months, rebranding and integrating the Clipless app into 8coupons as part of the deal.

I also began an iOS version of the app, but priorities were shifted when the company was acquired, and it wasn't completed.

This was a big win for me as an entrepreneur, so I will likely start other companies in this mold. Many insights came together to make this work:

  1. Realizing that my lack of skill with PR needed to be corrected if I was going to stay in entrepreneurship, I decided to contract out FusionPR and observe how they did it.
  2. This is smaller and more incremental than many of the companies I've started before, because…
  3. This was also when I decided I was going to bootstrap all of my successive ventures. I don't need VC funding for small goals (and demonstrated it in this venture). If VCs are too risk-averse to fund big goals, they're not really helpful to me.
  4. VCs will tell you that it's ok to be diluted because you'll own a smaller piece of a bigger pie. I realized that (a) founders underestimate the amount of dilution they take and (b) in the amount of time it takes them to get one business to that point, I could start five like this one. Bake lots of small pies.
  5. The central principle of the information age is "instant gratification". If you internalize this sentence, it will change your life.