Ask YC: How would you sell your business? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?

#21

Post by nikiscevak » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 7:26 PM UTC

inovica wrote: post #12

ericb wrote: post #4

When 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

I would second the Sitepoint premium marketplace.

Here are a few that are in similar ranges:

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/34096

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/34080

Having tracked the marketplace for the last few months there are a fairly regular stream of companies that have $10-15k in revenue.

They tend to be forums and have a very webmaster skew. So I am not sure there would be software buyers but it's worth a shot.

This forum was recently sold on sitepoint i believe too: http://v7n.com/

Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?

#22

Post by mattmaroon » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 7:52 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #17

emmett wrote: post #14

We 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..."

If that's not a typo, I know some investors who will be seriously pissed.

Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?

#23

Post by zkinion » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 9:09 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #17

emmett wrote: post #14

We 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..."

Heh, I found this thread off of vwag.

Eh, give him a break. He's probably been coding all day.

Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?

#24

Post by justin » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 9:24 PM UTC

emmett wrote: post #14

We 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.

$258.1k, let's not short change ourselves :D

Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?

#25

Post by justin » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 9:27 PM UTC

immad wrote: post #7

Kiko, previous startup of justin.tv founders, was sold on ebay. But I would not advise that for your startup, since I don't think you would be able to get enough attention to it from the right people. I think the best idea is to figure out who the best people to buy your startup are. Either because they can leverage the product best or because they are your competitors or because they have enough money and interest i…

The reason we sold Kiko on Ebay is because big companies we were talking to would have been willing to consider buying the company for a bit more, but only if Emmett and I went to work for them for some n years. Because (Total Amount of Money) / n wasn't very much, we said "fuck it" and just went for broke, so that we could work on our much more awesome idea, which turned out to be Justin.tv.

Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?

#26

Post by emmett » Thu, Apr 17, 2008, 9:31 PM UTC

justin wrote: post #24

emmett wrote: post #14

We 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.

$258.1k, let's not short change ourselves :D

And don't forget the $3000 in consulting fees charged for integration!

Re: Ask YC: How would you sell your business?

#27

Post by lux » Mon, Apr 21, 2008, 1:18 AM UTC

groovyone wrote: post #19

lux wrote: post #16

Off 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

I would totally be interested, but I'm already way over my project limit right now ;) I'm running one company by day and I'm launching another in about a month that we've been working on since last September.

I'd love to see a beta though when you guys get something online! My email is in my profile too now. I'll keep an eye out either way :)