Why We Rejected 10x Salary, Small Stake and Initial Bonus
Making out of a hard decision to focus on our startup.
Entrepreneurship is can be full of hard and tempting decisions. Recently, I had to make one with my co-founders. Me and my co-founders have been building things for quite a while.
And we have failed a couple of times. Finally, we found ourselves in a place where we are out of money and had to live.
We start a small product agency and luckily find some clients. This was not in our hearts, but at least we can live. We want to make something us and people want. Something useful.
But this was where life brought us. We were trying startup ideas while bootstrapping with clients (Not ideal, but it keep us alive.)
One day I saw a strange email in my inbox. Someone want to buy our agency business. After a few minutes of research, I realize they were quite a good fish.
I cannot disclose the name of the company nor any details. But here’s a snippet of the email we get from weeks of calls and a face-to-face meeting.
We got an offer.
More than 10 times our salary, small stake, and other perks. It wasn’t bad for business this young, and three 23 years old.
Especially in a country where there is a big recession. It might sound like every other country, but still, we’re in big trouble.
Here’s the latest graph of our currency exchange rate against the USD.
Perhaps some of you lucky entrepreneurs familiar with hockey sticks who gave you joy. This one is the exact opposite.
I’m not even talking about inflation. Some reputable institutions say it’s around 40%, some others say it’s around 80%.
No one knows, there is no price stability. And a lot of other bad things...
So, a 10x salary is a pretty good deal for folks who can pay themselves a bit more than minimum wage.
In today's terms, we could live a very comfortable, or maybe luxury life.
But we refuse to take that. It might sound like we’re idiots.
Yet It’s simple, we did not choose to do this for money or luxury. The only thing lacking in the offer was “Make something you yourself, and people want”.
From my experience on running an agency, We know that our calling is different.
Today, we onboard our first paid customer at Permify, our production-ready Authorization API. Maybe we need thousands of times more to just reach the same level of our offer.
But it feels damn good!
Entrepreneurship is hard, but it becomes harder when times of tough decisions. Make one, and make it count.