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Comment by suking | Hacker News Reader

Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.

Thanks! I guess to me, more important than the selling price, was the process as a whole. It's a product that I took from an idea, built out and eventually sold. In there were a lot of lessons that I thought might be interesting to people.

$3,500 might not be a lot to you. And obviously it's not enough to go away on. But it does mean that I can work full-time on my startup this summer.

I thought the post was great. $3,500 is better than the $0 that most people get for their side projects.

Congratulations on the sale and it sounds like it was a great learning experience.

edit: If you don't mind sharing, how did you end up finding the people who were developing their own sites? The post mentions customer engagement but not how you found them in the first place.

Thanks it really was - although I regret not spending as much time on it as I could have.

I basically ended up doing no marketing for DomainPolish whatsoever besides a few posts on my blog which were popular on HN. A few other people tried out the service and wrote popular blog posts as well. I think doing the thank you videos in the beginning was key because it gave people a huge incentive to tell their friends about the site.

I wish I had more to say on marketing but that's something that I'm working on a lot now for my new startup. Hopefully in 6 months I'll have some more lessons to share :)

congratulations on your experience!

It really is difficult to name a price, I would have ignored any offers below 10-15k but on the other hand you can now concentrate on a new project and for 6 months from 0 to sale is remarkable.

Thanks! That's one part of the experience that I'm definitely upset at myself for. But I'd rather get the mistakes out of the way while the stakes are low right?

according to some people a quite common exit is between 12 and 24 months[1] of the net profit. Considering his expenses (1700$) and sales (2500$), and initially ignoring the licensing fee, he had 800$ profit for six months, so let's round it to 150$/month, 3500$ is 24months of this profits. If we want to consider the single licensing fee, let's say he licenses once a year, it's 1500+1800 = 3300$/year, and so 3500 is a 12month evaluation. Still acceptable. 10-15k$ I think it was not acceptable (by the buyer of course) with this numbers, even thought he could have reduced significantly his EC2 expenses (and so having a much higher monthly profit)

[1] http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2012/02/28/the-inside-story-of-...

I always assumed the 12-24 month-rule only applied to "content"-sites like a blog or a forum, but Dan built a unique service that cannot be copied with the same effort as a techblog or a bulletin board

the link I posted is about Hittail, that is surely not a "content" site but a service

He also could have only spent $150 on hosting and been fine - wasted a lot of $. I imagine since he didn't work on it, sales were declining as well.

Start-ups are not judged by the same metrics as brick-and-mortar companies or established service companies.

When you're starting out everybody knows that the first couple of years will likely (but not always!) be a time when money is tight if you want to maximize your growth and hence profits will likely be depressed. You can reduce your growth to increase your profits but most parties would rather aquire a much larger company with an amazing growth track-record than something that earns a few thousand $ / month on a much more flat growth curve.

Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.

What's the point of even being on an entrepreneurial site if you can't celebrate someone's first success?

For instance, Dan complains about screwing up the offer he accepted. If I was in his shoes, I'd be very happy to learn this lesson now rather than when looking at five or six-figure sums - let alone anything bigger! ;-)

Sweet negativity, bro.

An exit is an exit. He made something, and sold it FOR PROFIT in 6 months, while being in college. Pretty impressive.

If you're going to use that definition, then everything becomes an exit... Work 12 months to make $2500, less than you would make in 3 months working part time job at Wal-Mart, must be an exit. Flip a used car for a $300 profit, another exit! Put up a garage sale, exit again!

Seriously, it's a lesson learned, experience gained. Not an exit.

Edit: to the downvoters, when you use the words "hate", "love", "epic" to validate some relatively-minor (to actual meaning) event or emotion, you're taking meaning out of that word ... in some cases just to feed that meaning to your ego.

except now hes a "serial entrepreneur" and has evidence for building up extremely valuable skills. Its an exit that can springboard him higher.

An entrepreneur works full time at an idea. He gave up, managed a meager sell of the domain out of pure luck.

I totally disagree. A $3,500 should absolute qualify as an exit. Congrats to the OP!

Yea but he's that much closer to multiple exits

To be fair, that's what I would sell a mediocre domain for.

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