Tiny Co Game Profit

A story about how Sully's former engineer bought a mobile game for $1M and retired at age 31 by doing minimal work.

"When I sold my company TinyCo, there were two parts: our original games like Tiny Monsters and Tiny Zoo, and our licensed games like Family Guy, Harry Potter, and Marvel. After the acquisition, we decided to sell the first part. One potential acquirer offered $500K.

I thought we could get more, so I created a new bidder. I hit up a former engineer from TinyCo and told him to bid $1M, which was twice the current offer. He won the bid. I told him, 'You should work 60 hours a week, put money into ads, add features to retain users better - you could 3-4x the revenue in 12 months.'

But he had a better idea. He was working as an engineer at another company, and he said 'I'm just going to quit and do the absolute minimum to keep this thing refreshed and working.' He decided to retire at age 31, live within his means, and let the app generate cash flow while he worked on hobby projects.

Then the world started working in his favor. Epic and Apple got into a lawsuit, Apple changed their revenue share deal - giving developers making less than $1M only a 15% cut instead of 30%. His profit immediately went up 15%. The business has generated more than $3M in profit since he bought it. The purchase price assumed revenue would go down, but it remained steady and grew during COVID.

His takeaway was 'the only way to win the rat race is to opt out.' I understand this intellectually but haven't accepted it emotionally. I'm still blown away by my friend's act of saying 'I have enough.'"