When to Sell Your Company
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The willingness to leave something you love, to go do something that will be much more profitable, is not so much personal choice as cold-hard economics.
A good example is how a lot of lawyers will do not-for-profit legal work, because they feel like they are making a difference, and improving the world. They are making a personal choice to do something that is important for them (or perhaps they are burned out in the corporate grind).
I've also seen lawyers leave the organizations that they love, because they also realize they need to make a lot of money - usually to pay off ludicrous college loans - but also just to leverage their position for some period of time.
At the end of the day, every decision is "personal" - but I think there is a difference between the emotive, "I chose to do this because I love doing it" verus the colder, "I chose to do this because it maximizes the risk-adjusted net-present-value of future earnings."
It's sort of like asking "How do you become a supermodel?"
It seems that way from the perspective of having never received an offer, but my own experience makes me skeptical. I haven't been in that specific position, but I have had a possibly analogous experience.
For a few years, I developed and supported myself with a graphics-tablet targeted shareware drawing program (now sadly, due to changes in the Mac shareware ecosystem, one of my backburner projects). One of the "big breaks" I imagined might come my way would be if a tablet vendor wanted to bundle my software with their hardware.
And one day, toward the end, I got an offer for exactly such a deal. A small vendor wanted to include my program in a tablet bundle for a relatively small holiday run. They wanted to know what I would charge per-license. I did some research to find out what a typical OEM markdown would be and made them an offer based on what I found. It was a significant discount, but it was a fair price, and I'd have made reasonable money off of it. They responded saying that this was far too much and that they really couldn't go over $1 per license, which would have been more than a 95% markdown. I attempted to negotiate further with them, but they stopped responding to my emails shortly thereafter.
Should I have just taken them up on their initial offer? Well, as the cards finally fell, I would have probably made more money that way. And if I'd known that I would shortly be shifting my focus away from development of that program, I might have made a different choice. But whether or not I made the right choice given the information available to me is not the point. The point is that it wasn't an easy "yes".
When you aren't getting any offers, it seems like any offer would be a coup. But that's not how the market works. If your company is worth $5000, there's somebody out there who would be happy to pay you $200 for it. You won't see many offers like that because the number of businesses worth $5000 is large and the number of people who are willing to send out insulting offers is relatively small. But "say yes to every offer" isn't a winning strategy.