TinyPilot: A $598K Exit Disclosed Down to the $610,147.83 Wire Transfer — Four Years of a $1M/Year Raspberry Pi KVM Business

Articles about selling a business usually hide the numbers that matter. The price is “undisclosed,” the fees are “transaction costs,” and the take-home is left to the imagination. Michael Lynch, who sold TinyPilot, wrote all of it down: the $598,000 sale price. The $88,900 broker commission. The $18,297 in legal fees. And the $610,147.83 that landed in his bank account on closing day, published on his blog to the dollar.

TinyPilot is a remote KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) device built on the Raspberry Pi. It relays keyboard, video and mouse signals over the network, letting you operate a server remotely even when the OS won’t boot. Lynch built it in mid-2020, while cycling through business ideas after quitting Google, and, starting from his own launch post reaching #1 on Hacker News, grew it over four years into a hardware business with a team of seven and over $1M in annual revenue. The trailing-twelve-month figures at sale: $1,022,090 in revenue and $207,816 in profit. Lifetime profit over the four years came to roughly $920K.

Every number in the deal

On the timeline: he engaged the brokerage Quiet Light on October 3, 2023, signed the LOI on January 23, 2024, and closed on April 12, 2024, start to finish in a little over half a year. The $598,000 price is about 2.9 times trailing-twelve-month profit, or roughly 35 months of monthly profit. Modest next to SaaS multiples, but for an e-commerce business carrying hardware, Lynch accepted it as a fair level given that the buyer assumes the inventory and manufacturing risk.

Three suitors, and an all-cash finish

There were three serious buyer candidates. The first, a company, offered $150K in cash plus a $100K salary plus profit sharing, effectively a conversion into employment. The second, a duo of founders, expressed interest and vanished without an offer. The eventual buyer, an individual named Scott, raised his initial $500K offer to $599K on the back of an SBA loan (a US Small Business Administration-guaranteed loan), landing at $598,000.

The deal terms are clean by design: no earnout, no seller financing, all cash at closing. Lynch made his decisions on the assumption that he would “receive nothing after closing,” avoiding the future-dispute risk that deferred payments create. His post-closing obligations were 30 days of free consulting (capped at 80 hours) and 45 days of paid consulting at $180/hour, up to 10 hours a week, of which only 25 of the 80 hours were actually used, because the day-to-day was documented well enough for the team to run without him.

Why let go of $1M a year?

The reasons are layered, but his most candid line is that the business “occupied 90% of my stress.” A hardware business lives with discontinued parts and supplier dropouts, forcing perpetual redesigns of the manufacturing pipeline. Lynch was open about missing the work of writing code, and at home he was planning to start a family. Avoiding the combination of founder stress and new-parent stress, notably, his motive for the exit was life design, not deteriorating performance.

Building a company that could be sold

What makes this exit instructive is less the price than the sequence of steps that created a sellable state. Documentation came early: he invested in operational playbooks and detailed transition checklists, and the handover finished in a third of the contracted hours. Outsourced manufacturing followed: moving from in-house assembly to contract manufacturing improved margins, which translated directly into buyer appeal. Clean accounting ran underneath it all: dedicated business bank accounts and email addresses from the start meant due diligence and the transfer ran clean.

His verdict on the 15% brokerage fee is likewise straightforward. $88,900 is serious money, but Quiet Light brought a buyer he could not have found on his own and advised him at each turn of the negotiation. “A broker isn’t mandatory, but in my case it was worth paying for.” As with Mirai Shokudo, the Tokyo diner that published its monthly books for four years, transparency about numbers becomes credibility in itself, and in TinyPilot’s case it had the practical effect of reducing friction in the sale process.

What went wrong

In his retrospective, the things he would change are just as specific. Topping the list is the discovery that spending during sale preparation costs about 4x: an expense reduces profit, and the multiple then applies to that reduced profit, so every dollar spent pushes the sale price down by several. The weight of due diligence surprised him too: two full years of bank statements plus custom reports built to the buyer’s specification, far beyond what he expected. Telling the team about the sale six months in advance was well-meant but complicated management, “wait until closing is certain,” he now advises.

Also: an SBA-financed buyer takes three-plus months to close, during which long-term investment decisions stall. He wishes he had offered a discount to all-cash buyers to close faster. And the M&A attorney should have been involved from the LOI stage, not just the final purchase agreement. On the technical side, transferring ownership of the GCP project proved miserable enough that he advises minimizing dependence on Google services.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

Little of this is TinyPilot-specific. Since the sale price is ultimately profit times a multiple, preparation that lowers the buyer’s risk (documentation, outsourcing, clean accounts) feeds straight into the price. Deal terms matter more in kind than in size: cash versus deferred is the essential question, and deferred components should be valued at zero. And expenses during the pre-sale period carry the multiple in reverse.

The limits are equally plain. Hardware e-commerce trades at about 2.9x profit, below software businesses. Even with $1M in revenue and $207K in profit, the net after commission and legal fees is $490,803, pre-tax, and the gap between the headline number and what stays in your pocket is large. For the mechanics of a sale process, compare Feather’s $250K SaaS exit two years after founding and Podseeker’s six-figure sale after a pricing struggle, the differences by size and business type are instructive. As a record with the full cost sheet attached, this one is rare teaching material for any small operator thinking about an exit.