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Everything in this comment is correct. If I may also give a brief suggestion, coming from a place of a lot of love for bootstrappers and sympathy for your situ

by patio11 12y ago

Everything in this comment is correct. If I may also give a brief suggestion, coming from a place of a lot of love for bootstrappers and sympathy for your situation, there is a line in your post which suggests that people compensate you for the 2.5 years you put into this when making an offer. I am afraid that this is at variance to how the world works generally and how acquisitions of small websites work specifically. People pay for their future revenues, not your sunk costs. In the world of small website acquisitions, you'll be valued at something like 1X your previously proven annual revenue, not at a linear projection from what spike day looked like. If that number is -- let me pick a representative example -- $100, then you have a $100 site, not a $60,000 site, even if $60k is a reasonable approximation of the cost of duplicating it using market labor. Also, as someone who also has struggled / struggles with depression: it is much much better for yourself and the world on net for you to just say "I am under stress and cannot email today, therefore, I will not email today." than for you to be adversely affected trying to get people replies to their questions about a browser game. Some people may be discomfit by this. That's fine. There is an entire Internet full of browser games. There is only one you. Do whatever you need to to not have this adversely effect you and your loved ones. Congratulations on shipping, by the way. Very few people can do it. You demonstrably can. That's awesome. You've got a lifetime of shipping successful software businesses ahead of you, regardless of what happens in the next short while.

ntaso 12y ago
Is it really that low? 1 times annual revenue? So BCC would be worth only a mid-five-figure number (not sure what your last reported numbers were)?
- peterjancelis 12y ago
  1 times annual revenue is actually a bit high. I've seen affiliate sites sell for 4 to 6 months of revenue. The reason is that after paying for the labor to maintain it there is very little profit in those websites. You are buying a job basically. Also, it's not unheard of for a small physical business to make 10% profit margin and to sell for 10 times profit. So that's around 1 time revenue as well.
  - prostoalex 12y ago
    There's a premium for established sites (user community, backlinks, PageRank) compared to brand new sites.
- patio11 12y ago
  It really is that low. BCC might get a slight premium because I have better options for buyers than Flippa, it has an exceptionally long history, and there's some value from association with me, but websites are not valued like businesses or startups. There exist plenty of excellent reasons why this is true: extreme risk from sites which are overly dependent on one or two traffic sources, implicit cost of operation often not being counted as a cost by the owner (BCC runs itself... It only requires the very occasional attention of a Rails-competent Ubuntu sysadmin. That's "free" to me but not free to the new buyer, and that sort of stuff adds up quickly when compared to five figure revenues.), transaction costs (time, training new owner or staff, etc) having to get recouped, a risk premium because it is a market for lemons and buyers feel that sellers may sell because of material no disclosed information like "I recently pissed off Google and the site may vanish from the Internet", etc. Ultimately of course things are worth what a buyer will pay you for them, but market is about 1X for "typical" sites at the moment.
  - mtrimpe 12y ago
    > Ultimately of course things are worth what a buyer will pay you for them An example of that would be finding someone (or more likely them finding you) who needs to build your product and can choose between starting an $XX.000 development project delivering in X months or your product which is ready right now.
    - patio11 12y ago
      Yep. A telecom did that for Appointment Reminder within a week of launch day. They wanted to do what Square recently did -- acquire a drop-in offering to cross-sell to SMBs. Anecdata: they opened with a $100k offer. I said that I had built it to run rather than to flip, but that everyone has a price, and that I'd be unable to turn down a million. No deal happened, obviously.
      - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        Just ignore if you're not happy answering, but do you regret asking for that specific sum or are you content that it was the right amount to go for?
- kareemm 12y ago
  In consultation with several sources including website brokers www.feinternational.com, most apps in the mid-5 to low-7 figure revenue range go for 2-3x earnings (in this case, earnings includes any salaries the founders / owners draw). This was consistent with the app I sold back in Feb, which went for 2.x times earnings. Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us podcast did an episode on this recently: http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-197-how-to-sell-a-web-application-with-guest-thomas-smale http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-197-h...
  - sharemywin 12y ago
    but that's usually something with years of sales history. it gets real shaky with only a few days of revenue.
- damoncali 12y ago
  That depends entirely on the type of site and how you come by that revenue. For some sites, it may be high. For others, it's way too low.
  - sharemywin 12y ago
    potential revenue growth is the only factor that would make things go up considerably.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- amorphid 12y ago
  At this point, I'm thinking of HackerExperience as a your job, a job that you don't want at the moment. HackerExperience is a new job, which may or may not stick around, and that job requires a lot of time and attention. It also doesn't pay very much. How much would you pay for a high risk, demanding job with low pay? Once you can prove that spending $X on customer acquisition returns $X+something, then it'd be easier for me to think of HackerExperience as a scalable business. Until then, it's a speculative venture to me. Good luck on your journey! HackerExperience will give you some great stories to tell :)

by patio11 12y ago

ntaso 12y ago

Is it really that low? 1 times annual revenue? So BCC would be worth only a mid-five-figure number (not sure what your last reported numbers were)?

peterjancelis 12y ago
1 times annual revenue is actually a bit high. I've seen affiliate sites sell for 4 to 6 months of revenue. The reason is that after paying for the labor to maintain it there is very little profit in those websites. You are buying a job basically. Also, it's not unheard of for a small physical business to make 10% profit margin and to sell for 10 times profit. So that's around 1 time revenue as well.
- prostoalex 12y ago
  There's a premium for established sites (user community, backlinks, PageRank) compared to brand new sites.
patio11 12y ago
It really is that low. BCC might get a slight premium because I have better options for buyers than Flippa, it has an exceptionally long history, and there's some value from association with me, but websites are not valued like businesses or startups. There exist plenty of excellent reasons why this is true: extreme risk from sites which are overly dependent on one or two traffic sources, implicit cost of operation often not being counted as a cost by the owner (BCC runs itself... It only requires the very occasional attention of a Rails-competent Ubuntu sysadmin. That's "free" to me but not free to the new buyer, and that sort of stuff adds up quickly when compared to five figure revenues.), transaction costs (time, training new owner or staff, etc) having to get recouped, a risk premium because it is a market for lemons and buyers feel that sellers may sell because of material no disclosed information like "I recently pissed off Google and the site may vanish from the Internet", etc. Ultimately of course things are worth what a buyer will pay you for them, but market is about 1X for "typical" sites at the moment.
- mtrimpe 12y ago
  > Ultimately of course things are worth what a buyer will pay you for them An example of that would be finding someone (or more likely them finding you) who needs to build your product and can choose between starting an $XX.000 development project delivering in X months or your product which is ready right now.
  - patio11 12y ago
    Yep. A telecom did that for Appointment Reminder within a week of launch day. They wanted to do what Square recently did -- acquire a drop-in offering to cross-sell to SMBs. Anecdata: they opened with a $100k offer. I said that I had built it to run rather than to flip, but that everyone has a price, and that I'd be unable to turn down a million. No deal happened, obviously.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      Just ignore if you're not happy answering, but do you regret asking for that specific sum or are you content that it was the right amount to go for?
kareemm 12y ago
In consultation with several sources including website brokers www.feinternational.com, most apps in the mid-5 to low-7 figure revenue range go for 2-3x earnings (in this case, earnings includes any salaries the founders / owners draw). This was consistent with the app I sold back in Feb, which went for 2.x times earnings. Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us podcast did an episode on this recently: http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-197-how-to-sell-a-web-application-with-guest-thomas-smale http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-197-h...
- sharemywin 12y ago
  but that's usually something with years of sales history. it gets real shaky with only a few days of revenue.
damoncali 12y ago
That depends entirely on the type of site and how you come by that revenue. For some sites, it may be high. For others, it's way too low.
- sharemywin 12y ago
  potential revenue growth is the only factor that would make things go up considerably.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
amorphid 12y ago
At this point, I'm thinking of HackerExperience as a your job, a job that you don't want at the moment. HackerExperience is a new job, which may or may not stick around, and that job requires a lot of time and attention. It also doesn't pay very much. How much would you pay for a high risk, demanding job with low pay? Once you can prove that spending $X on customer acquisition returns $X+something, then it'd be easier for me to think of HackerExperience as a scalable business. Until then, it's a speculative venture to me. Good luck on your journey! HackerExperience will give you some great stories to tell :)