Why We’re Selling Our Angel-Funded Software Company … On eBay | Hacker News Reader

Why We’re Selling Our Angel-Funded Software Company … On eBay

roachpost.com

24 pointsshabadoozie19 comments

I read they've had $2.5m in investment. I'm sure their board is loving this right now... must have been a fun meeting to attend.

As for the discussion about how many customers they have etc.. Would you continue using a service like this that was just sold on eBay? They're not going to have any customers by the time the auction ends.

it'll probably take more than a week to switch to a new video vault. You have to update links and move a lot of stuff. Depending on how locked-in the customers are, it could take quite a bit longer than a week to move.

But yes, you're right. This company is dead and no one is going to pay $500k for it. They may get $25k for the patents, but the servers, development environment and a rad pool table are not worth $475k.

This should be quite interesting. $500k for 100 customers seems pricey though, but stranger things happen.

Flippa.com seems to have pretty good pricing for selling websites though: http://flippa.com/pricing (Capped at $498 max)

Yeah, I was trying to figure out the sale price too. They have monthly plans that range from $50/month to $350/month. If we assume that they have 100 people on the $200/month plan, that's $240,000/year in revenue. So $500k could be reasonable. No idea what their expenses are though.

They have a free plan, so it's far more likely that they have 95+ people on the free plan, and a handful of paying customers. $500k+ strikes me as wishful thinking :/

The auction says they have 100 paying customers.

$500k doesn't even meet their reserve - it's just the starting bid they've listed. Who knows how much they think this is worth. Even at $500k this seems like it's way overvalued to me.

Flippa would've been the better venue for this. They get 6-figure listings pretty often now, cost less, format the listings better for selling websites, etc. For the buyers, they have very detailed search ("give me sites that are 2 years old, make at least $10,000 monthly in profit, have at least 50,000 monthly visitors, and accept escrow for payment"), e-mail alerts, RSS feeds.

I have a site for sale there now: http://flippa.com/auctions/84185/11000month-Revenue-No--1-In...

I agree. Also eBay is quite full of scammy "Ready made website for sale!!!" listings.

I've been checking Flippa from since it was still a part of SitePoint, and about 80% of their listings are those "turn key" sites. Of the remaining ones, there is usually something fishy, like selling copyrighted content etc. Occasionally there do seem to be legit sites for sale as well, and having a separate category for "premium sites" has helped.

i've had some success with flippa, but even then, only marginal.

i've had better success selling websites by approaching or marketing to niche buyers directly.

if you make a website about tennis, tennis related companies would probably pay a lot more, and they don't spend time on flippa.

> 4 points by dangrossman 19 hours ago | link | parent | on: How WooThemes Quietly Built A $2 Million Per Year...

There are over 18 million active WordPress blogs at the moment. It's a huge market. I spent a couple hours building a WordPress plugin and sold $200,000 in licenses for it in a year and a half.

Wow. It obviously was not just the coding. Just reading your sales page shows you are a marketing pro.

I'm skeptical anyone would buy a company the founders just want to ditch. Why aren't they saying they'll work for the acquirer for a year? Without that, figuring out how all the code works and how the infrastructure is arranged will be very very difficult if possible at all.

$500k is a lot of money for something with no support and no guarantee it will work without the people who put it together.

They seem like a bunch of people who have no idea how to run a business. They have spent a year trying to raise enough money to run for a year? That does not make sense.

Where is the Buy it Now button? Next to the Due Diligence button?

I like how their auction uses youtube to market their _online video marketing platform_.

Can I pay with Paypal?

According to their listing, yes.

I love the "Free Shipping" sticker on the left side of the ebay page.

I can't imagine selling a company on ebay, I wouldnt think that people visit ebay looking for companies to purchase.

That said, if it does work out for them, it probably is at a lower commission than other more standard methods.

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