Sold my 20 year side hustle

tl;dr I sold FutureMe to Memories Group Limited - am(almost)a

Way back in 2002, I was out running one day, and remembered as a 5th grader writing my future self a (physical) letter and handing it to my teacher. I never got that letter back. And on that run, I wondered what I’d written - realizing I’d never know. I also recognized that building software to “deliver letters to the future” wouldn’t be all that hard.

So I registered the domain futureme.org, and over a few weekends, hacked out FutureMe v1 with my friend Jay. It was 5 php files on a shared $11/month server.

Living in San Francisco, post dot-com boom and bust, we told a few friends, who told a few other...and in the intervening decades, through an admittedly mystifying mix of persistence, discipline, creativity and (most of all) luck, FutureMe grew into an enduring “indie” Internet brand, with many millions of users saying all sorts of nice things and sharing their experiences of writing and receiving letters.

During the past few years, it became increasingly clear to me that FutureMe had outgrown its humble roots. After considering several options - from taking VC investment to continuing to bootstrap - I decided to sell FutureMe to Memories Group Limited.

One of the things I'm proud about is that FutureMe (like Wordle!) is a consumer "Indie Hacker" success story - you don't need to build a b2b SaaS app! If you are working on a project in a similar vein that has a bit of traction, I’d be happy to help. In a nutshell, what worked for FutureMe: 1. simplicity above all else 2. move slow and don’t break things 3. be a little weird (and I will have more to say about all of this soon…)

In almost twenty years in tech, I've worked for (very) large brands and VC-backed startups tackling hard problems with amazing people. But nothing compares to my experience and the outcome of bootstrapping, building and selling FutureMe. Keep (indie) hacking, folks!