What Would HN Do?

http://www.sellingstartup.com/what-would-hn-do/

by wlj • 12 years ago

20 6 12 years ago

aidos2• 12 years ago

This is part of our ongoing saga regarding what to do with our startup. We decided to document the process as there are plenty of things we didn't consider before setting out (that potentially make selling a small startup untenable). As ever we'd welcome any thoughts from HN.

We'll post something about our experiences with Flippa soon - as it stands the potential for having a sale go bad while incurring Flippa fees is making us increasingly uncomfortable.

benlarcey• 12 years ago

Interesting note I saw in your Flippa listing; you're outsourcing your blog posts. I'm currently working on a marketplace that aims to ease this process. Would you mind sharing how you when about it? Odesk, freelancer.com?

wlj2• 12 years ago

We use a service called Ghost Blog Writers[0] that we discovered via HN a while back.

Have found them great to work with and would recommend them to others.

[0] http://www.ghostblogwriters.com

apineda• 12 years ago

What is the concern exactly (or, why are you selling?). To me this seems like the scenario I would like to be in, 1/hr month for $800. Less importantly but I'm also curious, how is customer service handled?

wlj2• 12 years ago

We covered why we're selling in a previous post[0].

The concerns that we have at the moment revolve around the actual process of selling a property on Flippa, for example:

- How do we securely handle the transfer of the website? (it looks like we can take care of domain name transfers with Escrow but what about other parts of the business (e.g. the code, social media accounts etc)

- There seems to be a risk on Flippa that your auction will hit the reserve, you'll be obligated to sell and will be liable for Flippa's 10% success fee and then the sale could subsequently fall through from what I can see, Flippa wash their hands of the process after the auction is finished.

- What other risks are there with selling a SaaS business on Flippa / what steps are critical to a successful transfer / sale that we may not have covered?

Customer support is all dealt with directly via email. In most cases we have canned responses for a lot of the typical support requests that we can respond with.

[0] http://www.sellingstartup.com/why-we-decided-to-sell-our-sta...

aidos2• 12 years ago

It's a valid question regarding why we'd sell it when we don't do much on it and it's bringing in cash. We're really occupied with our new venture, so we have no time to work on it. On the current trajectory, with no input from us, it will slowly fade away. Eventually the cost will outweigh the profit and we'll still have an obligation to our customers. Honestly, it may turn out that keeping it is the best option, that's why we're going to write about it as we progress.

What Would HN Do?

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