Mark Fletcher (founder of bloglines) gave a good talk which touched on this. Here's a transcription:
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/05/mark-fletcher-blogl...
Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#12When people post sites for sale in the sitepoint.com forums, to prevent the general public from stumbling across the sale, they usually use a tinyURL pointing to the site and avoid using the site name in the description text. This prevents the sale post from appearing in most search results. You could also check out the robots.txt for wherever you list.
Would someone sell a site for this kind of money on Sitepoint? I've seen $15k-$30k on there, but not an amount as high as this. A quick glance is that even in the 'premium' category most are in this ballpark or less
Edit: sorry, don't mean to offend. Just curious if you know of any that have sold for this amount
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#13When people post sites for sale in the sitepoint.com forums, to prevent the general public from stumbling across the sale, they usually use a tinyURL pointing to the site and avoid using the site name in the description text. This prevents the sale post from appearing in most search results. You could also check out the robots.txt for wherever you list.
Would someone sell a site for this kind of money on Sitepoint? I've seen $15k-$30k on there, but not an amount as high as this. A quick glance is that even in the 'premium' category most are in this ballpark or less Edit: sorry, don't mean to offend. Just curious if you know of any that have sold for this amount
No offense taken. In their premium section I have seen some things on for near this neighborhood (the lower part, though). My bigger concern is that sitepoint is about sites for sale rather than businesses for sale. To that end, I wasn't necessarily suggesting sitepoint so much as describing how people kept their privacy. If someone knows of a sitepoint equivalent for technical businesses, please post it--I'd like to check it out.
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#14We sold Kiko on eBay for $250k, which is around the neighborhood you'd want. The issue is that for that to work, you need to get a lot of attention. Since you have real revenues, I'd consider going to a boutique investment bank and seeing if they'll help you sell it. At the very least, even if they won't sell it themselves, they will probably tell you where you should sell it.
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#15We sold Kiko on eBay for $250k, which is around the neighborhood you'd want. The issue is that for that to work, you need to get a lot of attention. Since you have real revenues, I'd consider going to a boutique investment bank and seeing if they'll help you sell it. At the very least, even if they won't sell it themselves, they will probably tell you where you should sell it.
I'd second going to an investment bank or business broker.
This kind of revenue is similar to what a lot of small sandwich shops and retail stores get. While your business is different, there are many groups out there comfortable with deals of this size.
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#16Off topic, but I read your profile description and I had actually thought of doing something similar a few years ago. At the time bandwidth was still prohibitively expensive though. Nowadays, I don't think that's been adequately solved yet, and it would be much more realistic with services like AWS now. Good luck with that! :)
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#17We sold Kiko on eBay for $250k, which is around the neighborhood you'd want. The issue is that for that to work, you need to get a lot of attention. Since you have real revenues, I'd consider going to a boutique investment bank and seeing if they'll help you sell it. At the very least, even if they won't sell it themselves, they will probably tell you where you should sell it.
> We sold Justin.tv on eBay for $250k, which is around the neighborhood you'd want.
Hilarious kind of mistyping there. Obviously that was supposed to read "We sold Kiko on eBay..."
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#18Thanks to everyone for their input so far. I now have a few things to look at and research - the main thing is to move it forward. If I can sell it, then it will give me additional capital that will be useful, and another company who can market my existing product better than us can take it forward. Thanks once again - I really appreciate everyones comments
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#19Off topic, but I read your profile description and I had actually thought of doing something similar a few years ago. At the time bandwidth was still prohibitively expensive though. Nowadays, I don't think that's been adequately solved yet, and it would be much more realistic with services like AWS now. Good luck with that! :)
Thanks. I agree with you, though we've done 'ok' so far. Feel free to get in touch if its an area you're interested in. Email address is now in profile
Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?
#20You might be able to sell it to a gold farmer and then cash out the gold IRL.