Ask HN: Selling a project that has not been properly monetized?

Many here on HN are working on companies/apps/projects in the hopes of having a successful exit once their project "takes off". If a project is successful in the marketplace and growing exponentially, making a good exit should be feasible, and the options and recommendations have been discussed here before. And if the project is a failure, it seems obvious that it should be discontinued sooner rather than later.

However, what to do if a project has been successful from a technical perspective, has attracted a modest but enthusiastic fanbase, but has never been properly monetized? How to convince potential buyers of the financial merits of the project if the past revenue has been mediocre?

Concretely, we've been working with a small team on a project for 7 years now, and a huge amount of work went into creating good technical solutions for all the problems in the field. Recreating even parts of the solution would take other companies years even with a dozen people. However, due to a lack of marketing and an unsustainable sales- and ridiculously cheap pricing-model, our past revenue has been minimal. How could we possibly get a fair price when selling the app if the past sales have not been great?

The obvious solution would be to properly monetize the project ourselves to be able to get a fair price in an exit. But this would at least take another one full year with crunch time, and no one on the team can take it anymore. We need a rest from this project, permanently.

We've been floating ideas around:

• don't sell to a competitor or someone continuing the project, but sell the technology to those that would actually benefit the most from it. E.g. 'Jamf' could certainly increase their revenue with our stack by at least a few dozen million per year, but how could we ever convince them of this fact?

• Write up detailed documentation of each part of the technology, which is a lot more complex than one would assume without having worked on those problems for years. But would it fundamentally change anything?

• Write up financial extrapolations on how the app could be monetized: even with a pessimistic scenario (only 2/3 of the user base would be willing to go for a subscription for $20 per year), revenue would be $ 400k per year. With actual marketing, the user base could be increased tenfold, 100fold, the sky is the limit :)

• Try to drastically increase the user base by making the product free. If we had 10x more users, at least we would have something to show, right?

Does the HN crowd have any comments or better ideas?

Is it fundamentally impossible to get a fair price for a project if the financial numbers are not rosy?