If I had had my affairs in better order it would have been closer to one week of work spread over a few weeks of calendar time. Most of the unskippable process was due diligence, which was a real eye opener. Imagine an ex-Goldman employee quizzing you about a CC chargeback which was reflected in Stripe but not in the revenue books, which he had discovered by examining every transaction for 12 months with a microscope.
I'm told, somewhat to my surprise, that BCC was much better documented than most acquisitions handled by FEI, particularly in this price range. While the infra was lacking it was a major help to have nice clean books.
I didn't get my accountant or lawyer involved aside from a mentioning that I was selling BCC, as it wouldn't have been cost-effective. The deal was executed on FEI's standard purchase agreement with 2~3 clauses added at the buyer's request. Yes, the domains were escrowed.
Also, he may not have known it would take 3 full weeks at the onset (eg; if Rackspace had waved a magic wand on the accounts it probably would have saved a week)
Same for not knowing how much work it would be, it makes sense to stop when you realize it's going to be more work than it's worth, even if it creeps up on you.
For certain people, myself and perhaps patio11 included, it'd be worth that $30k of opportunity cost.
I'm sure Patrick felt a certain obligation to his users to ensure BCC was transitioned to someone who would look after them.
He could just stop answering support requests or flip off the domain, but then he's just paying with his integrity.
I don't do any of those things right now because, like Patrick, I'm building a pretty complicated piece of software, and don't want to spend the time and energy it takes to get a consulting practice into steady state and keep it there.
We both decided we wanted a break from consulting. Lots of people do that. It's not suspicious; in fact: thinking that it is suspicious is a pretty good tell that someone hasn't ever run a consultancy.
It feels like lots of people on this subthread chose an extreme interpretation of Patrick's story about his consulting practice: that running a practice with an X0k/wk average bill rate means that he also claims to be able to generate X0k/40 on any given hour. Anybody who claims that also probably hasn't run a consulting practice.
I'm not Patrick so it's a bit weird for me to be chiming in like this, but, on the other hand, it's pretty easy for me to point to a pretty big consulting practice that works the way I say it does (hi, NCC US people!), so maybe I can be more helpful in clearing this stuff up and not ratholing on "I've never run a high-value consultancy at scale and all this stuff sounds pretty fishy to me hmmm" stuff.
† Thinking more about why this is the case, it occurs to me that the consultancy running several years in also generates BATNAs for contract negotiations, which makes it easy to walk rates up --- you pay my full fee, or I have my choice of several other clients to give a discount to.
What? Sure, saying "I made $30k/week under one engagement" is cute, but that doesn't mean your rate is $30k/week. When the stars align, you take the nice gigs, but clients aren't standing outside your door begging to pay $750/hr every day of the year.
You also seem to think 30k is the 100% bill rate. A successful consultancy looks to be closer to 70% (and successful in this case means that they don't actively seek customers). The other 30% doesn't come from vacation, it comes from overhead.
The Bingo Card Creator falls into the same spectrum of charge out as Patrick's posted consulting engagements. Whether it was more or less is largely immaterial because consulting engagements are things he's been actively avoiding for a long time, while being done with Bingo Card Creator is something he's actively engaged in.
I'm not 100% sure I agree with Stavros' point, and I'd guess that there was a lot of downtime in the 3-week sale in which Patrick was doing other things, but if you read the situation as Stavros proposed it, the economics are the same -- as $63,000 > $57,000, it cost more to sell BCC than to keep it.
I won't speak for him, but is it really that hard to understand? Once you hit a certain income level, doing work that is interesting trumps maximizing paychecks by several orders of magnitude (at least I found that to be true).
Putting a nice little bow on a hobby project he's run for a decade and getting paid for it sound pretty good to me. Not to mention all the new learning he's just leveled up on.
The second is that when you've spend this much time working on a project, watching it die because you no longer have the time/focus to work on it is painful.
I've been in this situation several times, and being able to hand a project off to someone who will take decent care of it is far better than seeing it go under. There is a personal connection to projects like this, to the point where the time invested in selling it might not make sense to an outside observer.
His story has been all about contribution to the community. Since the BOS days he's been writing about his adventures and people who have earned far more have used his writings to make money.
One of his writing tricks is to over-contribute. He sometimes responds to an HN question with overwhelming value that often surprises the asker. Fuck 30k a week. Measure something else.
(Primary benefit of his mentioning gig weekly cost: you can probably charge more. Focus on the value you provide and up your rates. That's been his message for years.)
Was this thanks to Stripe, or another service, or another way you documented transactions? Or just the fact that you documented them at all?