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RickS

To the extent you're willing to comment, I'd be interested in knowing about your criteria for selecting such a project.

- 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?

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To answer your questions:

- 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 had a network locally that I knew I could sell to"

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.

Thank you very much for your answer! Both the most predictable and the most interesting thing IMO is the factor of your existing network in the success of the product. More and more I'm seeing the compound returns of network reach in the careers of my peers who have spent their entire lives working with large teams/customer bases. If I had to restart my career today, I would spend the first 5-10 years in enterprise and then go startup, instead of the reverse.

Wishing you the best – really great to have an income stream like that, buying you room to make even more successful bets.

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