600k per month in a country where the average salary is reportedly about $8k per year (Georgia) isn't terrible, especially for such a small team. Getting in about 75 local yearly wages of recurring revenue per month is definitely worth the risk!
Agree 100%. People here are missing the forest for the trees. The creator made way more doing this than he could being employed at even the highest levels in tech, and pulled in huge income with way shorter time frame and less risk than taking VC money and having to exit via acquisition or IPO.
Sure, they got steamrolled in the end, but it’s an absolute win by any metric.
Slight correction, the article seems to indicate they are based in Bulgaria and their employees are remote from several other countries (including Georgia, but also e.g. the UK).
Not that it takes away from your point, it still sounds like a great success to me.
As others have pointed out, that phrase means something else.
What they were doing here is usually referred to as sharecropping, because you're building your business on someone else's land/platform. The real owner can kick you out at any time, and you have no recourse.
It shouldn't be referred to that way. That term has a specific meaning. The profit has to be quite small compared to huge losses when you get run over.
When the profit pays back the initial investment quickly, and the risk is that you have negligible losses but stop making more money, that's not a bulldozer.