06 - I sold FounderStack to another founder, here's what happened next
How does one sell a domain? Does online trust still exist? Does a name change warrant a direction change? What has happened in AI this week?
👋 Hello! I’m Jon, founder and builder. I share my journey of building a company with AI—helping you learn about the latest tools & workflows to use in your life.
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Welcome back!
A lot has happened in the last 7 days, let’s dive into it.
Quote of the week:
"Success is largely the failures you avoid.
- Health is the injuries you don't sustain.
- Wealth is the purchases you don't make.
- Happiness is the objects you don't desire.
- Peace of mind is the arguments you don't engage.
Avoid the bad to protect the good."
By James Clear (Atomic Habits).
I have sold my domain FounderStack.ai.
I am now thinking to pivot out of the tool space completely, at least in terms of what I am building myself.
A failure? Maybe, though I see it as a success. It is not to say that one should avoid failure altogether. That’s where the learning is at. Rather, to fail quickly and to readjust.
Based on all your overwhelming support and feedback, I’ve also decided to start offering what I know to employees that want to up their AI game, fellow founders that want to start building better and SMEs that want their companies optimised.
More on that below.
Let’s dive into it! ⬇️
Welcome back, my fellow builders! Thank you for being a part of the build crew.
A warm welcome to the new subscribers since the last edition!
In today’s update:
I sold FounderStack!
Pivot 1: a building expert
Pivot 2: Surf & skiing photo platform
Live: Jonnefrankena.com for all your AI questions & business needs
Update 6 - 31 March, 2025 - profit!
🤔 How am I feeling?
I'm actually feeling pretty good! I made a sale online just by doing this initiative and putting some time into it.
Though it's not the exit that I wanted to have in terms of building a company and selling it, it's still crazy that it happened, and it does feel very good.
I'm excited for what's next. Also, of course, a little bit lost in terms of "if not this, then what?" but I have some cool ideas moving forward.
So yeah, five out of five today!
Missed the last one?
In the last edition ⬆️, we discussed…
What has happened in the last weeks?
Selling FounderStack?
Collaborations?
Pivot
What’s next? The updates from the last weeks:
🤑 I sold FounderStack
…‘s domain.
I already spoke about it last week, and you can see a read-along with all my conversations with Simon about selling FounderStack.ai to him. This week, our negotiations continued (you can read them down below), and we agreed upon a price. I sold the domain and transferred it to him. The entire process was surprisingly smooth and also instilled a lot of hope in humanity because it was really based on a lot of trust - meeting the stranger online, both ways. I think that's really cool that that can still happen these days.
After the last newsletter, I didn't hear from Simon for a couple of days. I followed up with him with some more messages, as well as mentioned him in my LinkedIn post and comment. I think that in the end triggered him to reply (or he just didn't see it), but in any case, our conversation continued which is good.
We then agreed upon a price as you can see in the screenshots. I couldn't get him to get as close to the price that I wanted, but I'm still pretty happy with the result, seeing as it's something that I just bought in the last couple of weeks.
I used some negotiation tactics from the book "Never Split the Difference". Specifically, I used a specific number - $1430. I showed it at the calculations in terms of the cost that I did have, the cost that I would incur moving forward (having to rebrand and rename), as well as showing a lot of empathy and understanding for his situation while also explaining my point.
When we agreed upon a price, I continued the conversation by email and we decided to draw up a simple contract for the domain transfer stating the terms. It was very brief. However, in this contract, suddenly appeared, as Simon drew it up, a clause around brand name usage rights barring me from ever using the name FounderStack.ai again, in any context and that for me was unacceptable.
Of course, when I sold the domain I wanted to change the name as well. What’s the point of keeping the name if I don’t have the domain? However, I do not like the idea of being locked out of it forever especially because our negotiation was only about the domain name and not about the brand rights, in any of our conversations.
I was just a little bit taken aback by it.
This led to some discussion over email while still being very friendly and quite firm, as you can see from the attached screenshots. I won't include everything because it is a bit lengthy.
In the end, we got to a middle ground where I was barred from using the name for some amount of time as well as using similar variations such as afounderstack or thefounderstack, and for me, that's fine because I don't want to use it anyway.
Okay, the deal was signed. Now what?
“starts putting into ChatGPT: How do you sell a domain name?”
As with anything these days, instead of Googling it, you just ask your friend ChatGPT. It came up with some useful answers and some hallucinations, but the transfer through GoDaddy account seemed super easy and it was just a matter of payment and potentially escrow.
Then came the moment of the actual purchase, and we first discussed Stripe but given that Stripe and all these platform take a commission and given that Simon is based in Switzerland, we opted to go with an IBAN bank account transfer, thus avoiding fees.
I provided Simon with my IBAN account, and I told him that if he wanted, we could use a service like escrow.com which charges 3-6% of the purchase price. What happens is that they hold it in escrow, so Simon would pay the money to them, I would transfer the domain to them, and then they would transfer the money to me and the domain to Simon.
Like a trusted third party, and therefore resulting in trust that if Simon pays me, I'm not going to scam him and never send a domain.
But Simon was very trusting and said that it wasn't necessary; he had a good feeling, and of course, we've already been talking on LinkedIn which is a bit more of a trustworthy platform. It may have been different if we would have met on Reddit or X, it wouldn't have been the same.
I got a confirmation from Simon that he sent it and a day later I got the money in my bank account. 🎉🎉
After that, I used GoDaddy domain transfer to very easily transfer the domain to him. Fill in his email and customer number that he provided, and done!
Congrats Simon on the purchase and best of luck with (your) FounderStack 😉! A part of me is happy that FounderStack lives on in some small way, if only by domain name. If you go to FounderStack.ai now, you’ll be redirected to Simon’s site!
Thanks again for allowing me to share this journey here!
Great to see that trust in humans is still alive in these times ;-)
💡 I sold my first ‘build’ for $1,430 or €1,331. Just the domain, so let’s make the next one the actual build!
🤖🛠️ Pivot 1: AI Builder & Expert
That brings me back to what's next. It's great that we sold our domain name, we made a lot of profit, especially given the purchase price of the domain, which is a crazy number in percentage.
€80 → €1331,33 = 1564,16%
However, that’s not the full picture of course. Many more costs were incurred along the way, and there’s also switching costs.
It's still not what I started to do, which is build with AI in public. I've been doing that, but I haven't actually gotten to the part of building yet. Now I'm left with what I'm building.
First option, of course, is just to continue with what I was doing under a different name. You find a different name, get a new domain, and just keep it going.
However, now comes in what I mentioned last week from my conversations with Ghita and seeing her platform, deciding that maybe it's not what I actually wanted to do. The main issue is that my solution feels too far away from the problem - when are people going to actually pay for this solution? Is it just finding your tools? Is it some kind of AI search agent? Is it integration? etc. So that has made me come to the following conclusion:
I just love working with AI, being on the forefront, reading about it, posting about it, giving you guys updates.
My conclusion now is that I just want to position myself as an AI builder & business expert. I want to keep building with AI and create multiple companies with it and just gain expertise and fame as an AI expert, an AI building expert while I do it.
While I explore what I'm going to build next, I really have an idea for the first interesting little thing I can build. I also decided to create my own website, jonnefrankena.com, where you can go to with any and all of your AI questions and you can hire me.
I now offer a free discovery call of 20 mins where you can shoot all your questions at me.
If you want to know how to improve your day-to-day job, build your next business or move past manually prompting some things in ChatGPT, this is your chance.
Free now, but not forever.
More on this at the end! 👇
🏄⛷️📷 Pivot 2: Surf & Ski Photos App?
Here's another interesting & fun idea that I had. I'm currently in Indonesia with some close friends from China that Ale and I met in the Masters.
In China, it's very popular to have photography apps where people just take photos of people skiing on the slopes or surfing and then if you recognize yourself on the website, you can pay for shots of you (you don't have to actually hire a photographer or find the guy in the beach to pay him for your pictures).
This is massive, but there's no solution like this in at least here in Southeast Asia, but I think neither in Europe. I think it's super cool to start a little tool for this and see if we can convince some local photographers to upload their pictures and convince some local surfers or skiers to just check them out online.
A lot of photographers take a lot of pictures of people, but they cannot really sell them because they cannot find them later.
It's also quite a pain point, so you have to actually find this person on the beach, go through all the photos on their camera, see if it's you, and as swimming people just taking pictures from boats from the shore, fly flying out with drones.
And yeah who doesn't like a cool shot of himself surfing or skiing? This is a fun little idea that we're having at the moment, and we plan on building something with that quickly, just with the eyes closed to use and see how that goes.
Why reinvent the wheel when you can copy what has been validated abroad already?
So that's the first little little nugget that I want to build. I'm probably either aiming to use Lovable for this as a very basic version or play around with Bolt (Both now has a Figma integration), and I plan on collaborating with a very skilled product designer in our friend Gu and it will be great to take his take my designs into Bolt quickly add some features to it and go from there.
📱 Jonnefrankena.com: for all your AI questions & business needs
Based on all your overwhelming support and feedback, I’ve also decided to start offering what I know to employees that want to up their AI game, fellow founders that want to start building better and SMEs that want their companies optimised.
I made this site in 2hours in Webflow, which was fast because I already had an older version of my own site, so I just had to update this one and mostly focus on good copy.
I do tend to get stuck in the nitty-gritty, being detail obsessed, so luckily I had Ale pushing me to have something done to show her by midnight. 😅
Other routes I considered were Framer (like I used for my founderstack.ai landing page) with the following template. Think it’s a lot better? Worth switching at some point? Drop a comment.
Or some of the newer AI builders such as 10web or durable.
These tools aren’t as sophisticated, but get the job done.
I believe the future of web isn’t $5,000 custom-built websites anymore, but rather building (web)assets instead: quickly test ideas with AI generated pages, highly-tailoring them for target audiences.
Back to what I’ll offer:
I’ll offer both engagements, that is my time with you 1:1 or deliverables, concrete outcomes you or your business might want.
My reason for doing this is that we all want to be surfing this AI wave, but it’s easy to get lost (or smashed by the wave).
We all use ChatGPT, sure. But how to implement actual changes into your company or your workflow? How do you get more efficient, get AI to get you that promotion or build the business you’ve always told yourself you would, one day?
If any of this sounds interesting, remember you can claim your free discover call now, before it’s no longer free :)
🗞️ This week in AI & startup news
Keeping up with the trend I saw for FounderStack Mozilla released Blueprints: a developer-focused hub for open-source AI workflows. It offers modular projects, complete with tools, datasets, and models, to help you quickly build and customize AI solutions. Something I could have started, though the developer angle is too far from what I know. Shared by my friend Prakhar, thanks!
Google Gemini 2.5 - simply the best?
As mentioned during the time of the DeepSeek hype: LLMs are goiong to keep competing with each other, getting better and cheaper. Great for consumer and builders alike! Google has now taken the throne from ChatGPT and Claude, hugely improving the Global Average score, as well as being the best LLM we’ve seen so far in Coding and Mathematics…
Should be publicly available as of yesterday, 30 march. Lmk if you give it a spin!
Grok vs Elon
Some real beef between xAI’s Grok and techdaddy Elon? Grok labeled him as misinformation spreader and in some other chats, you can see it reasoning and be quite conflicted, finding that Musk is a big spreader of misinformation but also having been instructed by him to ignore that information. Interesting, given that Musk claims xAI/Grok is aiming to find mathematical truths, or something along those lines.
When do we get an “AI Transparency” score on our LLMs? Who controls the black box?
Monopoly money? xAI CEO Elon Musk buys X(twitter) from its CEO Elon Musk
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) company has acquired his social media platform in a multibillion-dollar deal. The deal, announced by Musk Friday (March 28), values his xAI at $80 billion and X, the social media platform once known as Twitter, at $33 billion ($45 billion minus $12 billion in debt)
🛠️ Tools!
Tip of the week:
Napkin.ai!
Quickly want to visualise an idea, a concept, a workflow from text. Napkin (like you know, back of a napkin calculations) is a tool that does exactly that. In beta and free for now, exports to png, svg and pdf. Great for your Miro boards, presentations or simply to explain things to that one friend that always needs a little extra info..
Want more tools?
Don't forget that as a thank you for being a subscriber, you can access them all my recommended tools for free here, no login or anything required!
Thanks for reading!
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I’m a founder, undercover nerd & padel-addict - writing about building businesses with AI, in public. I’ve launched multiple start-ups since 18, and bootstrapped CORE Global to high six figures. I share my favourite tools, my founder journey and other curated research here, on AI Builds a Business. You can also hire me for all your AI needs.
Thanks for reading! With love from Indonesia ,
Jon ☀️
Interesting to see the process.
This is definitely an interesting read! You're talking about a lot of stuff valuable to people who are also in the same space (which is where I want to be, in the future!) Will be saving it for more in depth reading :) Keep it up.