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Comment by dshipper | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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