Ask HN: Selling a SaaS Service | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Selling a SaaS Service

27 pointsthrowawaii11 comments

I've received an offer to sell a SaaS service I've built, but I don't fully trust the buyer. The buyer comes from a crypto background and, for that reason, has a maintained an anonymous and rather limited online presence. I've never interacted with the buyer prior to this.

There are a bunch of things that would need to get transferred as part of this transaction:

- Source code of the web application

- Analytics accounts (Mixpanel, Segment)

- Infrastructure (AWS)

- Domain name and email accounts

How to best approach this deal so I don't get screwed? In addition to the contract itself, I'm thinking

- use an escrow service

- have domain be part of the escrow

- ...?

What else could I do to make sure this goes through properly?

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You’ll need to engage with a lawyer, at minimum. Someone with business brokering experience.

You need proper contracts drawn up and reviewed. Don’t let the buyer push you into anything you’re not comfortable with.

Also beware of false buyers who don’t actually intend to buy your business. It’s unfortunately very common for investors to pretend to be interested in buying a business only so they can get access to your data and information for the benefit of their own business. Don’t reveal more than necessary during this phase and don’t assume the deal is done until it really is.

This sounds like sound advice. Also, talk to someone with experience in these and they can help you see if it's worth your while to engage in the first place.

I'd engage with a business broker ASAP. https://feinternational.com/ is one I've heard of, there are others. They'll take a cut, but can guide you through the process.

You also may want to read this: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s... as it is a detailed walkthrough of selling a business

And listen to this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/08/26/kalzumeus-podcast-episo... an interview with the founder of FE International

This seems important to you and you're not convinced about the buyer, so you definitely should talk to a lawyer.

Escrow is a must, so that the money/transferred assets are released based on mutual consent.

And something unrelated to the particular transaction - if you have multiple offers, then it's easy to get a better price. You can probe at least in the obvious places like here, IH, etc., who knows what you might get.

If you're selling for 5 figures at least, surely he should have the money to take a plane into where you are and do an in person contract AND handoff?

Put it on microacquire.com and have them buy it through there. Zero cost and risk to you.

Checkout https://microacquire.com/

It may guide you as yo how to go about things externally, or you can use the platform fully.

Define your target first, protect your source code? or protect your data?

I would get a lawyer

I’m not an expert on the subject and wonder why a condition of 50% upfront and 50% after everything transferred wouldn’t be appropriate?

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