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

Tiny Acquisitions

tinyacquisitions.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 178 posts

Re: Tiny Acquisitions

#141

Post by patrickk »

zebnyc wrote: post #122
prawn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with time for SEO/content work, general outreach and so on, could definitely capitalise on these opportunities. Many people building these projects don't have the time or interest in the more social side of it.

I know web development and my wife has been hankering to learn SEO / web analytics on her own. I would definitely buy spend 5-10k even if it is just so she can get some real world experience learning SEO in the real world.

There’s loads of online courses and even free YouTube resources where you can get started for free. Learning from the ground floor with something you built from scratch is far more illustrative IMO.

Re: Tiny Acquisitions

#142

Post by patrickk »

jononor wrote: post #139
hinkley wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the trick must be if you can amortize some of the maintenance costs across multiple projects. Maintaining DNS records and SSL keys is not 3x as hard for 3 domains as for one. Probably neither are taxes. Or keeping on top of security fixes for projects using the same tech stacks. There’s a couple groups out there who do something like this for public sector projects, sort of taking over the devops aspects…

Yeah and you can leverage learning across projects also. Find a marketing strategy that works well for one of the projects, then deploy to the rest. And one can share the cost of outsourced labor down the line. For example one customer support agent, software engineer, marketing person could work across all products/businesses, which might together fill near a full time role. It is often terribly hard to hire good pa…

Not to mention you can leverage skills learned from earlier projects, greatly accelerating your progress. For example, if your project relies on content marketing, perhaps you learned to write quickly and produce enticing YouTube videos, and outsource effectively to remote writers (all skills that take dedicated time and effort to get good at). You can definitely leverage that and speed up your progress.

Re: Tiny Acquisitions

#143

Post by robryan »

glangdale wrote: post #138

Weird that anyone would acquire anything for Maybe I have an exaggerated notion of this after having been part of an 8-figure exit to an S&P 100 company, but I would figure you take on anything like this you're potentially buying something with an imminent lawsuit, patent infringement problem, etc. unless you do due diligence, but that said due diligence would be ridiculously expensive relative to the $ involved. Do…

Those issues though generally scale with the amount of money your company is making. The likely worst case is shutting down and being out the $5k.

Re: Tiny Acquisitions

#144

Post by raspasov »

iaw wrote: post #85
alex_g wrote: post #68

If you're interested in buying and/or selling small projects, you can typically expect to pay more than $5k for something that's making any consistent amount of money. You're also unlikely to find a great deal on a really special project on a marketplace. People who post on marketplaces like Flippa or MicroAcquire or SideProjectors (there're dozens of them) have either: 1. Realized the time it takes to maintain is no…

Just to echo this, I recently had a lovely conversation with a guy building a business he knew would be irrelevant in 10 years with the goal of selling in 3 years to someone who didn't realize that. I will never buy a business, real estate is a much safer bet.

Don't you think that's a bit of an extreme statement? There must be a price where the price-to-risk ratio makes it worth it. Nothing is 100% certain, after all. Every investment has some amount of risk.

Re: Tiny Acquisitions

#146

Post by lelanthran »

All the HN comments here say "buying/selling projects", which I guess is because the website itself says "buying/selling tiny projects".

However this is very different to buying/selling businesses (i.e. going concern with books up to date), and the search interface doesn't let me specify that I want to buy something with at least one paying customer (i.e. a business).

I'd be interested in buying a going concern (even if it's going off a cliff), but not someone's weekend attempt to learn a new web platform whose only hits are from search engine indexing and people who got there by mistake.

Seems like all you'll be buying here are snippets of working code, which is not very valuable in and off itself.

Re: Tiny Acquisitions

#148

Post by weavie »

IgorPartola wrote: post #114
runako wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of reasonable reasons people would list a sub-scale business on a site like those. Some examples: Take an app that makes $500 net monthly and requires 1-2 hours per week of work. Solid hourly rate, why sell? Except: - Sudden change in family responsibilities leaves founder without the small amount of time needed. - The business might net $5k in a sale, and the founder has an urgent need for cash (for…

I am in that last category myself. I had a really nice and useful budget app that had thousands of daily users and cost all of $20/month to keep going, if that. Was making some money off it too with ads and sales of the ad-free version. Except I built it using Ionic back when it was based on Angular 1. Fast forward to now and that code simply doesn’t compile anymore against modern iOS and Android and I don’t have the…

Not just javascript, I built an app in Objective C. It stopped working after IOS 8 (I think) and I no longer had access to a Mac to update it. I too am in the stage of just replying to customers to explain why it isn't available.

Re: Tiny Acquisitions

#150

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

alex_g wrote: post #68

If you're interested in buying and/or selling small projects, you can typically expect to pay more than $5k for something that's making any consistent amount of money. You're also unlikely to find a great deal on a really special project on a marketplace. People who post on marketplaces like Flippa or MicroAcquire or SideProjectors (there're dozens of them) have either: 1. Realized the time it takes to maintain is no…

That last one is exactly what a friend of mine did. IIRC, he contacted a business broker and told them what he was looking for and they found the company.

He bought a literal Mom & Pop outfit that made thermocouples for a specific application. The "Pop" was going blind and Mom wanted to retire. They were barely making money but my friend realized that it was mainly because they were underpriced and their marketing was nonexistent.

He bought the business for a song and immediately called all the customers and told them he was raising prices to market rates. After turning things around, he sold the company about five years later for a healthy profit.

Post reply on HN