Michael, initially I thought it was kind of a naive idea that wouldn't take off because there are so many tried and true and enterprise class alternatives. They are pretty clunky though.
The immense care and diligence you have put into setting this up means the new buyers will have a great launching point with few surprises.
Suffice to say, I would have liked to buy this thing for $600k, but I guess you dropped off my radar for the past year and I didn't realize it was up for sale.
What terms would you have offered, including any seller financing, required lock-in or employment from Michael, etc? What would you have done with the product after acquisition?
I think the terms they came to were pretty generous to the buyer. Michael brings a lot of value to the deal as a seller, there isn't going to be a hidden gotcha, more likely hidden benefits of forward thinking you'd uncover over time.
Lock-in or additional hours from Michael wouldn't be needed, the product isn't awfully complex, and I'm sure everything is more documented than you would expect.
What I would have liked to do would be to use the company as a scaffold to develop a larger mid-market offering. I don't like mid-market that much, but they are much more willing to cobble together a better, cheaper solution, rather than just buy whatever package that HP or Dell is offering.
I would also try to sign up and train some government focused resellers to see if we can make progress in that segment. USG is very favorable to small businesses. Control over the supply chain would be a selling point to USG as well.
I would also try to partner with someone like System76 or a similar US manufacturer to make the existing TinyPilot product be a recommended KVM component for their server and small compute offerings.
> I would also try to sign up and train some government focused resellers to see if we can make progress in that segment. USG is very favorable to small businesses. Control over the supply chain would be a selling point to USG as well.
You have a procurement onboarding process that's just sitting around right now? I've been looking at small, local companies that will be closing due to lack of staff/interest once the owner calls it quits.
The immense care and diligence you have put into setting this up means the new buyers will have a great launching point with few surprises.
Suffice to say, I would have liked to buy this thing for $600k, but I guess you dropped off my radar for the past year and I didn't realize it was up for sale.
Congrats!