Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

tinyprojects.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 148 posts

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#111

Post by noodle »

Spinosaurus wrote: post #83

I wonder how viable a sort of "micro PE" firm would be, basically a company that just buys many of these micro indie projects with positive cash flow with the goal of holding on to them for profit or investing into their operations and eventually reselling them. There's been this trend of new firms popping up that acquire small ecommerce brands (in fact, there was one on HN just the other day). I'm wondering if the s…

I've also thought about this a lot wrt microsaas projects. Specifically, looking to acquire projects that are small but match my tech expertise such that I can consolidate certain aspects of them easily. Ultimately maintenance will probably be the biggest problem with acquiring numerous small projects, so making that as easy as possible is important.

It would probably not be "viable" in the sense of it becoming a unicorn, but it probably is a viable small business or side project. I get the feeling that once you become a medium sized business, you kind of necessarily outgrow the "micro" part of the monicker.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#112

Post by giarc »

sideproject wrote: post #54

I do see an increasing number of projects being posted on my little website too https://www.sideprojectors.com The original premise of SideProjectors was to buy and sell small indie projects. Over the years, I've seen many many of these small projects (often ecommerce shops, dropshipping businesses, but at times quite interesting ones too) being submitted. As a side note (pun intended) - I've been also watching out f…

I listed a project on your site, I can't remember if we found the seller there or not.

However, good point about the pre-packaged apps. If someone describes it more honest, would you feel better about them? For example, if someone was upfront and said "I've done the work of putting together this site, you don't need to know the mechanics, you just need to run it."

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#113

Post by giarc »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #33
ismayilzadan wrote: post #2

Any advice on actually finding the idea that is worth doing? I have a notion page with 20+ tiny ideas, but I still don't find any of them encouraging enough to spend time on. How to overcome this very first step?

20 is a very small amount of ideas. Keep coming up with more, and they keep getting better. It's a skill like any other.

The real learning comes from executing on even those dumb ideas. I learned more from 2 dumb Shopify sites I built and ran then listing out ideas.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#114

Post by giarc »

corobo wrote: post #42

> Could I pump out tiny SaaS starter projects and sell them at $10k+ a pop? Honestly I'd probably never trust a business doing this. From my POV they're probably just after cash from a buyer, not a good place for my data. I know I'm probably an outlier though, I don't think I've seen anyone else note a lack of privacy policy on the names one for example

I've sold a few small tiny businesses and some of the potential buyers are just students in their dorms with extra time on their hands. They have a bit of cash they can part with and just want to run a tiny site or Saas as a hobby more than anything. It's also a great way to get feet wet before they finally execute on that "great idea" they have :)

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#115

Post by giarc »

Quarrel wrote: post #24

Interesting that microacquire was used. I struggle to take seriously a site that lists "Our team" as characters from Silicon Valley.

If you follow Andrew on Twitter it would probably make more sense. He's an interesting guy and very active on social media which brings a ton of traffic to his site I'm sure.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#116

Post by allenu »

ismayilzadan wrote: post #2

Any advice on actually finding the idea that is worth doing? I have a notion page with 20+ tiny ideas, but I still don't find any of them encouraging enough to spend time on. How to overcome this very first step?

I don't think you'll ever know off the bat if an idea is worth doing. A lot of ideas sound good to you, but there are so many unknowns, like whether you have a suitable audience and whether there's a good ROI.

As an exercise, you could try doing a rough design of a working system to get a feel for how much work it would be. On top of that, you could try imagining all the things that could go wrong and try to predict the likelihood of each. That's what I would do, anyway.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#117

Post by axaxs »

stefandesu wrote: post #39
admissionsguy wrote: post #8

> Giving your project to a stranger on the internet is risky, so we used escrow.com to make the transfer. I sold a website on Flippa once. The buyer put the money on Escrow.com, I transferred everything over, and they went AWOL. What I found out is that there is no straightforward way to obtain the funds when it happens. Apparently there is no way at all except via the court system. Which would mean the only real pro…

Germany's biggest Craigslist-like service recently added a service like this for purchases that are shipped. I sold my previous MacBook using the system and found it really stressful to wait for the buyer to confirm the item. In my case, it was just someone who was a little bit slow and just forgot, but I can imagine abuse in the system. Same thing happens with PayPal buyer's protection. I can't think of a better sys…

A better system would have some agreed upon holding period. Two weeks perhaps? Enough time at least that the buyer has received the goods. As much as I hate Paypal, that's essentially what they do. They hold the funds until they've confirmed the item was delivered.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#118

Post by SamBam »

twobitshifter wrote: post #84
danvoell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never Split the Difference is another good book to read.

This negotiation as written was just moving down by the same amount offered by the buyer, is that what the book would recommend as a technique? It gave a gain of $750 over splitting the difference from the start.

I haven't read the book, but, in general, it's not a good move to split the difference from the start, because there is usually at least one more round of back-and-forth. So once you've split the difference, you're already going to end up closer to the other person's initial bid.

e.g. "I want 10,000" -> "I'll offer 5000" -> "Let's spilt the difference and say 7500" -> "How about 6000?" -> ... now you're already between 6000 and 7500.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#119

Post by SamBam »

andersource wrote: post #108
clairity wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

think of negotiations as a price discovery mechanism (auctions as another example) with severe information asymmetries. the point of the process is to learn what each side values and what exactly is on offer (and can be potentially offered) and how much value each side places on those things. price is used as the primary signal of value, and you learn about value as prices and information is exchanged in an iterated…

Thanks! Yeah that's my idea, I guess what surprised me is the ranges involved. In the few times I had to negotiate (always as a "seller" as in salary negotiation), I would state around 110% of my minimum, and I was really prepared to walk away if the offer was below that. That worked but I guess it conditioned me to treat buyers' offers as 90% of their maximum while in reality it doesn't make sense for them to start…

I'm no expert, but salary negotiations may be different. If the rough range you're expecting is $100k, and you start the negotiations at $200k, they might actually take it as "this person has completely unrealistic opinions of themselves" and/or "this person is going to walk out on us the moment they get a better offer, so there's no point hiring them."

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#120

Post by SamBam »

leodriesch wrote: post #5

This is very interesting. I only really heard about these billion dollar aquisitions like Slack, I didn't know that there is an online marketplace for buying startups in the range of a few thousand dollars. That's awesome!

Everything I've seen around here has been from the seller's perspective.

Has anyone here bought a tiny startup/project like that?

If not, is there some demographic not represented on HN who is buying these?

Post reply on HN