Ask HN: How can I sell my hacker house business?

The first year we only operated half of the space for the first two months. The second half was delayed by construction and opened in March. The uncertainty of construction meant we could not line up bookings ahead of time, and this impacted our Q1 and Q2 earnings for 2016. We also had the costs of opening the location, loan payments and opening a 2nd location.

In 2017 we finished paying off all of our loans, and have not opened any locations. While the year is not complete yet, we are ahead of where we were this time last year.

Daily operation of the place has a few major components. There are a number of contractors to coordinate, most notably our completely awesome cleaners and the repair contractor. The repair contractor requires coordination with the landlord and often subcontracts, so you occasionally need to be a little hands on with the subcontractors to make sure everything is done to the completeness which you intended.

The items with inflexible hours are checkins and reset. New residents require a welcome, an orientation, and supplies like sheets and towels. These hours are restricted to 5PM-7PM. Checkins happen 7 days a week but there aren’t checkins every day. Some residents have flight delays or weird circumstances which require other checkin hours.

House reset is currently on Mondays at 7:30PM. House reset is when all clutter is brought to the main area of the house, returned to its owner, or sent to goodwill. Residents also help roll out upgrades, like assembling IKEA furniture.

Mostly, cleanup functions as a way to get the residents oriented with the house and set behavior expectations. Residents frequently come off 6 to 20+ hour flights into their checkin. It is not reasonable to expect them to remember everything you tell them at that time. Residents learn a lot more during reset, particularly where all the bathrooms are and where they can find more toilet paper. They do not clean things aside from getting the kitchen sink and counters under control but reset is extremely important for house cleanliness. The data is extremely clear that residents who participate in cleanup make way way less of a mess in the house in general.

Reset is timeboxed strictly to one hour, and after that we serve snacks and drinks. That is the time when most residents get to know each other and we get to know them.

Chores are minimal, though you will wash a lot of laundry on season changes and you do buy a lot of toilet paper. Costco delivers.

We have never had a house head not live on their campus, though every house head runs their house differently. I’m not sure you need to live in the apartment, but you probably want some sort of community leader nearby and accessible. Some residents stay for multiple years, so promoting one of them might be an option. Having somebody accessible is important when residents lock themselves out, but also for setting house culture.

Honestly though, the opportunity to be positive part of people’s lives and a first community in a strange new place was a big upside for me. The residents eat at Thanksgiving with us, I’ve taught some of the younger kids how to cook, and on a few occasions I’ve held a resident’s hand in the hospital when their family was thousands of miles away. I like singing happy birthday to them, and they often come back to visit us. Also, we run the coolest trick-or-treat house on Halloween.

The residents honestly can be pretty awesome too. I feel guilty in that I probably get a lot more from them than I give them. Grad students are fascinating, and they come for every reason from research at NASA to the reading Stanford historical archives to working in Google Brain. I’ve gotten to try food from a lot of countries, and learned to cook a few of the recipes. I’ve learned a lot about a lot of cultures and picked up lots of fun slang and idioms (a favourite, from German, is “shooting sparrows with a cannon.”) Also my professional network has grown substantially including access to a lot of new fields. The cash is good, but I think you’d miss out on a lot of intangible upside if you weren't there.

As for the three of us running the place: I’m pretty sure one person can do it. Our schedule works like this right now: one long day a week of running the house, three days a week of building whatever startup we’re trying, and one day a week of studying. Because coordination is hard we think it is less work for just one person.

We're selling the company itself.

Also, we need to travel for the software startup, and this isn't exactly a remote job.

It's more or less "one or the other" and we chose "the other."

The three of us talked and we're open to somebody managing the place. We have done house head training when it is needed to open a location, but we like to have somebody experienced shadow them for a few months before going solo. The timelines are pretty tough for this house though. This is why we were going to sell the company for the location the three of us live in.

All of that said, if you're interested in having this conversation, we are willing to have it.

Hostels are fairly transactional. Dorms involve community responsibilities, including from the residents. This is everything from helping sort clutter each week to running a really cool house every year for the local trick-or-treaters.

Pensions are things where you don't have to work. This is a job, not a full-time job, but it still does require work. There is an aspect of running the place (we order a LOT of toilet paper from Costco) but also we are responsible for a community. We once had a resident whose parent died when they lived here, and yesterday a resident was hit by a car while biking to work (a long way from our place, and yes the doctor said he is fine. He more or less only lost some mustache).

These folks are sometimes a long way from home, often quite young (early undergrad), and sometimes foreign. We are their community out here, and often act as a sort of designated older sibling when stuff really gets real.

We operate very very differently than Chez JJ did.

Because of our community focus, the vast majority of the residents in the house at any given time are long-term, and here much longer than 30 days.

Even if this was not the case, this location is composed of more than one building and no building has more than 5 bedrooms.

Mostly, we have an excellent real estate lawyer.

Short version: we're open to it. This said, normally house head training to work under our systems is longer and we like to have somebody experienced shadow the new person for a few months before going solo. We were worried about the timeline, so we were considering just selling the company that runs the location we live in.