Sometimes it's just the simplest, least technical and gimmicky things that make money.
- was the domain related to your expertise, or in a niche that was new to you?
- what made this project stand out from others / appear to have potential?
- was codebase quality a factor in purchase?
- do you inherit things other than software from the seller? EG customers, marketing channels, analytics, etc?
- what was the value-add that made it work under your stewardship but not the seller's Sales / marketing / dev / featureset / etc
- Are you interested in doing this repeatedly?
- Yes, the domain area was something that I was interested in already, but not necessarily practised. - Quite honest, I chose it purely on price and the design of the items bought. The dev put in effort to get everything designed nicely. - No, not at the time. It was a rails project so quality was not considered since its too easy to add on/rewrite where needed - Got customer lists, source code + design source, social media pages, analytics, payment profiles, domain. - I had a network locally that I knew I could sell to. I sold hard and 3 big agencies are now using it at a decent monthly fee. - Definitely! I'm scouring 1k daily now and have found a few other gems.
I suspect this is the key to success in most smaller startups. Instead of focusing on getting 0.01% of a global market go for 10% of very local/focused market.
A prepopulated sales channel goes a long way.
Wishing you the best – really great to have an income stream like that, buying you room to make even more successful bets.
I'm a bit surprised you haven't heard about this one: https://flippa.com