Ask HN: Best way to sell a small web app?

Don't sell the app: If it's self-sustaining without taking up much of your time, charge for it!

For support-related tasks, find someone that will do the support for a percentage of the new revenue you realize with some version of the suggestion below.

Tell all your existing, un-paying customers that in 30 days, you're going to start charging $19.99/month for it, but if they sign up before the pricing starts, they're in for $9.99 (or $12.99--whatever floats your boat). Leave all your existing customers happy by not charging them more.

You could also consider an annual subscription model where they pay either $240 a whole year, or $199 if they sign up before the date of the price change.

A lot of your customers will say no and leave, but some will likely say yes and contribute to your top-line. Either way, you'll make more money than you're making now. Be sure to explain why you're charging: E.g.: I think the service is valuable and in order to keep it running, I need to charge something for it.

THEN, once you have more paying customers, you can either sell the app and charge more for it or sit back and have a pssive revenue stream.

UPDATE: @ barmstrong, If you're not interested in the above and decide you DO want to sell it, contact me and we can talk about me buying it from you.

This is poor advice. Powering RSS-to-email is a losing proposition unless it's destined to bring more value than the FREE Feedburner. Also, forcing users to switch from free to paid (or else) with 30 days' notice is a jerk move, especially with an RSS product.

Your product is promising, but isn't easily differentiated from Feedburner and thus it's difficult to charge anything for it. I'm surprised you have any paying customers actually.

However, if the guts of the application are as solid as they seem, then you have a gem on your hands that just needs the right business touch to position the product for the right market.

Your first point is a valid one, but 700 people are using his product and not the free Feedburner for one reason or another.

Re the 30 days, I meant it (and all the prices) as an example--I should have been clearer.

I think there is a market position for this service. If you are currently a non-savvy blogger, then the current feedburner homepage: http://feedburner.google.com/ is practically indecipherable and unlikely to result in a lot of conversions. I also believe that a smaller operator who concentrates on adding value to a product such as this would have a high chance of success versus Google where a product such as this can, and probably will, be easily lost in terms of internal development priorities and management attention.

I agree it's not a super strong differentiator. But here are a few of the features it has over FeadBurner:

http://feedmailpro.com/faqs/7

Mainly I built this as a response to Aweber charging bloggers about $75 a month for a similar feature list.

>Tell all your existing, un-paying customers that in 30 days, you're going to start charging $19.99/month for it, but if they sign up before the pricing starts, they're in for $9.99 (or $12.99--whatever floats your boat). Leave all your existing customers happy by not charging them more.

This sounds a bit like pulling the rug out from under his current users. Perhaps a better idea, if the OP has the time, would be to implement new features in order to try and convert some of the free users. And every time a new feature comes out, announce it to all the users, reminding them how much better the paid experience is. That's how freemium works isn't it?

I think this is a great suggestion. I'm trying to be sensitive to the OP's situation though: He's in ycombinator and doesn't have time.

If you want to sell it, create an auction on http://www.flippa.com

If you're asking more than $1000 for the site, only accept payment through escrow.com.

Flippa's the best marketplace there is for selling websites in the $50 to $250,000 range. I've sold several sites there in the past, including one for $90,000 which had several serious bidders. There are real buyers there.

The site that sold for $90,000 - please do tell which one.

http://www.wpreviewsite.com/

Yes, that's the one.

http://flippa.com/auctions/84185/11000month-Revenue-No--1-In...

Good idea. Yep I was thinking about that - browsed it a bit and most of the sites looked like total crap. "Make money at home", diet scams, etc.

But maybe there are some diamonds in the rough. Will try listing there, thanks!

Flippa has a very detailed search/filter system so you can ask it to only show you sites that are over a year old, with over $x in monthly revenue, and get their income from a certain source, etc. And you can save the search to have it e-mailed to you. There are tons of "built to flip" sites for sale but it's easy to find the older sites too.

Do the buyers there care about the technical aspects of the website?

when selling a site, do you clean up code, or comment ? Also do you have to provide any kind of support ?

Try to sell it on Flippa: http://flippa.com

Unless your site is profitable, selling it is not going to get you a fair profit for the time you have spent on it.

The cheapest investment for you is marketing. Use your favorite outsourcing site to hire a worker to create a list of sites that would benefit from your service. I'm guessing that how-to and news blogs would be your best customers.

With this list compiled send them all a template email telling them about what your product does for them. The ultimate goal being more paying customers which allows you to either sell it for a good price or hire someone to work on it for you.

I'm very curious why this comment got down-voted. I would not have thought of doing what aberkowitz suggested, and it's doesn't sound stupid to me at all. Would anyone care to explain why they think it's a bad idea?

Probably because it sounds like spam. Not saying it wouldn't work either - but that that is probably why.

The down vote was me. It was accidental but as you know, I couldn't reverse it and I thought it would correct itself so I didn't bother responding.

I actually don't disagree with the advice. It's a method I plan to use on an MVP that I'm working on soon. I think it can be effective if not done in a spam-like way.

I'd be interested if the business model were a little different. It seems like it's just a replication of Feedburner in its current iteration, but you have to pay for it after 1000 subscribers. I think there's another approach that would be both more intriguing as a business model and more compelling as a product, without changing the app itself very much. Interested in connecting? scottmagdalein@gmail.com

It has some features FeedBurner doesn't, although I like FeedBurner a lot: http://feedmailpro.com/faqs/7

Will message you.

There's plenty of other reputable places besides Flippa to sell a website and some will probably get you a better price. There's a list here - http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2010/10/01/how-to-find-websit...

Wait....you pass-through your users' ads (from their blogs).. too bad you cannot get any of that ad-sense revenue (if there is anyway).

biz opp right there if you can attract more money-making bloggers

Hubpages does rev sharing by showing their adsense code a certain % of the time and the authors code the remaining. Maybe this is a good way to monetize the free customers.

I'm not aware of a way to do it technically since I'd have to integrate with any sort of ad system they might be using. Most probably Adsense for feeds, which I don't think allows me to rev share. Also, for some reason adds in RSS feeds tend to convert terribly compared to normal adsense - at least from what I've seen.

What ever you want to do it, do it quickly. As one of the paying customers, I don't want to grow my subscribers in there and have trouble later transferring to another service.

Maybe you should post how much you are looking to sell it for.

Would you consider partnering with someone who could take it over and run it for you? How can I contact you?

Can use the contact form on my blog that is linked from my profile. Thanks!

Clickable http://FeedmailPro.com

Not a fan of the stick figure.

Ok, thanks for feedback - considering the number of upvotes I'll go ahead and remove that :)