5 ms·
I have a $400K/year bootstrapped SaaS I'd sell if I didn't have to deal with the process of selling it. But because I'm not willing to pick up the phone and tal
by dangrossman 7y ago
I have a $400K/year bootstrapped SaaS I'd sell if I didn't have to deal with the process of selling it. But because I'm not willing to pick up the phone and talk to buyers and lawyers, and the long-term transfer of knowledge about an old tech stack and all that, I'm likely going to sit on it until some day I shut it down, or some kind of marketplace appears where you can flip a business like that without getting on the phone.
- Bombthecat 7y agoIsn't that very sad for the customers?
- dangrossman 7y agoI don't see why. My experience in selling websites in the past (sub-$100K so I could just go through Flippa) is that the new owners never add anything, keep the site up for a year or two to recoup their money, then shut things down. I'm still hosting services I wrote as far back as 1998 (as Perl CGI scripts).
- charlesdm 7y agoThing is you don't want to sell to a nontechnical owner. I've sold apps in the past where it all just died, because the purchaser did not put in any effort. You want to sell to a party who will run it as if it was their own product (or who will hire a capable team to expand it further). That is possible for a $400k ARR product, but much harder for a website doing say $50k through one-off sales.
- mscasts 7y agoMay I ask why you would want to sell such a business? Running such a business is my dream and I just have a hard time understanding why someone would sell a profitable business unless you're set for life?
- mritchie712 7y agoI have a profitable SaaS that I'll likely sell at some point. My reason would be to diversify and start a new challenge.
- rihegher 7y agoCare to details what kind of business and some figures ?
- mritchie712 7y agosure, it's https://seekwell.io/ https://seekwell.io/ landing page does a decent job describing what we do. we're a general purpose analytics app tightly integrated with other SaaS apps. I won't get into specifics on MRR, but we currently have thousands of users and hundreds paying
- rihegher 7y agoThanks
- tylertringas 7y agoLots of reasons, although as i said in my post, unless it's a "strategic acquisition" at a huge multiple, it's usually not because "the math" of selling makes more sense than holding it. In my case, having the liquid capital from the sale allowed me to start a fund to invest in more companies like this (https://earnestcapital.com/ https://earnestcapital.com/). Something I probably couldn't have done while operating my SaaS and just out of the business's profits. Other reasons are that the acquirer is a better fit to take the business to the next level, so if you hold it the business will likely degrade whereas a buyer has the capacity to invest in and grow it... also to create opportunities for growth for talented employees who may otherwise get bored and leave.
- dangrossman 7y agoI haven't had a vacation from being on-call 24/7/365 for the past 15+ years. I've been woken up by texts from server monitoring systems more nights than I can count. My wife and I had to plan our honeymoon around internet availability. I'm tired. I have other businesses that don't require the constant vigilance of an SaaS where every minute of downtime is costing hundreds of customers money.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoAlternatively you could hire someone to take over the day to day of it while you, being the sole shareholder, get the rest of the profits without having to spend much time on it, leaving you free to pursue other interests.
- dbbk 7y agoThis seems like the most obvious solution... I'm not really sure why they would want to sell it unless it poses some kind of personal risk to them.
- at-fates-hands 7y agoI'v attempted to do this before and it takes someone you really trust to take over the business. I had three months before I had to step back in and make sure the business was running the way I envisioned. The person I thought I could trust came in and basically started making big changes he thought should be made without consulting me. It's incredibly hard to let go of something you built from the ground up and hand it over to someone you trust enough to run it the exact same way you did.
- tylertringas 7y agoMy two cents: It's a great idea if you find the perfect person but is very hard to go out and do. The compensation you need to provide to bring on someone to run the entire business, in terms of salary + ownership is often ends up with pretty similar economics to just selling. Also very tricky waters to navigate long-term if you both retain a majority ownership of the business but cede all day to day operations and strategy to somebody else. Likely to end up either with some conflict or the hired CEO gets tired of doing 100% of the work in a business they only have a minority stake in. Definitely not impossible and has the potential to work out to better economics than a sale if all goes perfectly. (I'm the post author btw)
- simonswords82 7y agoA lot of these bootstrapped business owners don't have a lot of people management experience. The idea of hiring somebody to run the day to day operations of the business is financially sound. Finding, incentivising, managing, monitoring and collaborating with that person/people is a separate set of challenges most solo/bootstrapped people do not possess the skills to undertake. Moreover, their business is their "baby" and letting somebody else take the reigns is emotionally difficult.
- bitcoinmoney 7y agoWhy not hire a broker?
- bananatron 7y agowww.1kprojects.com and transferslot.com exist - maybe they're too small for your situation?
- brianbreslin 7y agoFEI and empireflippers are better for this range of earnings. 1kprojects are mostly low-end of the scale.
- giarc 7y agoCorrect, FEI and Empireflippers have a $25k minimum sale price. They don't dabble in the small sites.
- sideproject 7y agoHappy for you to post it on sideprojectors.com and see what happens?
- rc_mob 7y agoLol this sounds so oddly relatable