Selling my startup - freescreencast.com | Hacker News Reader

Selling my startup - freescreencast.com

freescreencast.com

20 pointsjaskew16 comments

I have given it a good run. I have a business partner with money, many great developers and testers on my side, and a some-what successful go of it.

But I no longer have the time. I'm ready to pass on this torch and give it up to someone. The primary reason is family. The other is I have found several other excellent sources of income and I can't justify spending the time to over come the bump on freescreencast.com.

So I want to sell: buyer gets several items: source code for both client software and for the website, and the domain.

Most importantly, however, is the buyer inherits the userbase, the user accounts, and the content created by the users.

Search is primarily long tail, but we're top ten in many, many searches.

So... any takers? Any advice?

The alternative is a shutdown, which I just don't want to do.

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I have given it a good run. I have a business partner with money, many great developers and testers on my side, and a some-what successful go of it.

So I want to sell: buyer gets several items: source code for both client software and for the website, and the domain.

Most importantly, however, is the buyer inherits the userbase, the user accounts, and the content created by the users.

Search is primarily long tail, but we're top ten in many, many searches.

So... any takers? Any advice?

The alternative is a shutdown, which I just don't want to do.

I will gladly answer any questions.

A potential buyer might be interested in knowing how many users you have as well.

From http://blog.freescreencast.com/2008/08/28/update-on-the-stat... "8000 downloads, over 2500 accounts"

and what language/platform, hosting costs, etc...

I would say those are actually not very important. Domain name recognition, page rank, user base, organic traffic and database are what matters in "websites".

Any pasionate bastard can port it to the host and infrastructure of his or her choice in the proverbial "weekend" ;-)

It's PHP, for what it's worth. I know because the first thing I do at any site is look at their error handling. Here's theirs, trying to load http://freescreencast.com/screencasts2:

  Missing controller
  
  You are seeing this error because controller Screencasts2Controller could not be found.
  
  Notice: If you want to customize this error message, create app/views/errors/missing_controller.thtml.
  
  Fatal: Create the class below in file : app/controllers/screencasts2_controller.php
  
  <?php
  class Screencasts2Controller extends AppController {
     var $name = 'Screencasts2';
  }
  ?>

Not a very professional effort IMO.

Here is the server string:

  Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_fastcgi/2.4.2

And it's on a Dreamhost IP so probably debian (if I remember correctly?)

update: Man, I really don't like CakePHP's error messages. Check this one out:

   Fatal: Confirm you have created the file : /home/.quintuplet/prodfsc/freescreencast.com/app/views/pages/getstarteds.thtml

Great, now we know the dir structure. This is something that just should never be displayed. Doesn't CakePHP have "production mode"?

Doesn't CakePHP have "production mode"?

Yes, its a matter of changing the debug value to 0 instead of 1 in /app/config/core.php. If this were set you'd be getting 404's instead of error messages.

@OP - This probably isn't the best place to sell your site, but you're going to need a lot more stats if you want to sell it anywhere. At the very least you need to show proof of revenue over time. A good place to start your asking price is 8 * monthly_profit.

6 hours later and debug mode still hasn't been turned off, even though you told him exactly how to, in his own thread. Unbelievable. Most of the web devs I know would have panicked, fixed the setting and redeployed within minutes of learning they'd screwed up in a visible and embarrassing way.

Inspire confidence this does not.

You might be better served doing this on the Digital Point forums or Flippa.com.

This site isn't nearly spammy enough for the savages over at Digital Point but Flippa might be worth a try.

Also, if you're serious about selling, put a very visible graphic on every page with a link to a sales pitch PDF. The basic stuff everyone here has asked for should be included: traffic, revenue and background technology information.

With no revenue you're going to find yourself instantly offended by low-ball offers but you might find a diamond in the rough if you're patient.

Do you own freescreencasts.com as well? I notice it was registered not long after, has the same private registration vendor, and has the same nameservers. Could be coincidence but if you have that domain too it makes it somewhat more valuable.

http://alexa.com/siteinfo/freescreencast.com

how about some hard data then ?

It looks like the site has very little traffic, a few hundred users / day at best. What is the businessmodel ? Revenues ? Expenses ?

If you really want to sell it wouldn't take more than 10 minutes to collect the most important metrics.

Sounds about right, there is a graph here...

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/freescreencast.com/

Put it up on eBay.

Actually, let's just start bidding right now. I'll put up $50. Anyone for $55?

I bid $400 :P Thing is, this is still nowhere near what the OP wants to hear, but we haven't been given any real data yet so it's like sticking a flag in quicksand.

I'll bid $500. For real.

HN is likely one of the worst places to try and sell something like this. We all believe we can rewrite 80% of something like this in a couple of weekends, given sufficient caffeine.

The $500 bid is based on the likelihood that if you find a buyer on HN, some tech bloggers will likely pick up the story, and the PR value itself might be worth it.

Let's see.

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