His 20-Year-Old Side Project Sold for Millions

They Got Acquired tells the story of Matt Sly…

In 5th grade, Matt Sly wrote a letter to his future self and handed it in to his teacher. Years later, while out on a run, he let his mind wander. He thought back to that letter but couldn’t recall what he had written.

That sparked the idea for FutureMe, a platform that allows people to send emails to their future selves 📝

Matt writes on LinkedIn…

So I registered the domain futureme.org, and over a few weekends, hacked out FutureMe v1 with jay patrikios. 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, creativity and (most of all) luck, FutureMe grew into an enduring “indie” Internet brand, with many millions of users writing and receiving letters, and sharing their experience.

After running FutureMe as a side project for nearly 20 years (since 2002), Matt was approached about acquiring the business. He ended up selling in 2021 “for mid-7 figures.”

So something like $4 million 💰

As Matt puts it….

I’ve been in this game since 1999 and knew that valuations in the software market were at historically high levels, so financially speaking it was a good time to sell. Twenty years is a long time so I felt ready for a new chapter – and FutureMe was ready for a new perspective, too.

Oh, and the site was making good money before the sale 🤑

Bootstrappers reported last year…

It generates over six figures in revenue and costs Matt just $500 to operate each month.

FutureMe apparently has “three product lines”…

consumer payments, advertising and SaaS custom sites.

Consumer payments = a premium subscription that costs $5/year or $100 lifetime.

And “SaaS custom sites” appears to be their offering for businesses 💼

Anyway, I like that Matt was patient and let the business grow on its own terms…

The nature of the use case meant letters were written, but it wasn’t until they were received at a later date that the users had that ‘wow’ moment.

Unfortunately, Matt revealed in an email to They Got Acquired that he was diagnosed with cancer a few months after selling FutureMe 😔

Thankfully he seems to be doing well and has a new project called The Parent Bank.

Last words from Matt…

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 hacking, folks!