Good job and effort, but $100 MRR. I think there should be a threshold for claiming a 'acquired\sold' tag
Sold is sold. Crossing that threshold is a huge step. Congrats to the author.
I wish them hearty congratulations on the sale and good luck with the next adventure.
Do you think Supreme has anything valuable beyond its logo mark?
Edit: Still congratulations to you and thank you for sharing!
Natural language is not boolean algebra or legal text. Most people think of employees when they talk about a company. Hence the word company as in "having company". What most people think is what defines a word. That's how language works.
Of course you can call selling a software (everything OP listed as sold can be classified as software) selling a company. I do not want to demean what OP did. If he were to insist on having sold a company and not a software project, it would just sound a bit like the guy on LinkedIn calling himself CEO of his company, while being self-employed working out of his basement. (Not that OP does any of that, again OP did great!)
The sale of your company was an asset sale, which means the amount you made from the sale will be taxed as income. That’s fine for the size of the deal and low complexity of the product. As you said, you sold some code, IP, and design.
If the transaction was much larger, say $1m+, you’d be pushed to the top federal and state income brackets and be paying a lot in taxes. Top federal income tax rate is 37%.
Most larger companies are C-corps, which is a boring way of saying they issue stock, have shareholders, and a board of directors. It’s a more complicated structure, but it’s absolutely necessary if you want to bring in outside investors and/or know you’re going to build a high-growth company.
Under this arrangement, the thing that’s sold is stock. Just like you buy and sell MSFT or AAPL. Selling a C-corp means you sell over 50% of the company stock to a buyer and they control the company. No IP, design, code, or assets are sold—what’s sold is control to all of those things.
Back to taxes: the seller pays a capital gain tax rate, which depending on more factors worth enumerating here, come out to a little above 15%. There’s also this thing called qualified small business stock, which discounts that 15% rate on the first $10m of gains if you’ve held that stock for more than 5 years and sold it (it’s more complicated then that).
The shorter answer to your question, “what more is in a company?” — equity!