Smash Notes
Getting acquired by one of the biggest companies on the internet
Channing Allen runs a website called IndieHackers with his brother Courtland. They’re a two-person team who advocates staying small and intentional growth. Then, one day, they got an email from the billionaire CEO of one of the largest tech companies on the planet to be acquired.
Notes
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Indie Hackers is a business run by two brothers, Courtland and Channing Allen. It's a community for entrepreneurs and digital business owners to connect and to learn.
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One day they got an email from the CEO of Stripe, asking if they'd want to sell. The request took Courtland and Channing completely by surprise.
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Every new business that takes place online and does well is a potential user for Stripe. If Indie Hackers do well at growing the business community, Stripe will do better.
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On Company of One, Channing Allen explains life after Stripe acquired Indie Hackers, the site he runs with his brother Courtland Allen. Day to day it is still the two of them. They wake up, look at their own roadmap, and judge the work by whether they are inspiring and educating people who run small businesses. They are Stripe employees on paper. The real contact with Stripe is the resources they did not have before: a design team, a marketing team, and the corporate team, plus advice when they ask. Decisions otherwise stay inside Indie Hackers. The deal worked, he says, because Stripe did not turn the site into a Stripe billboard on day one.
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