Hot answers tagged selling-business
13
Getting your domain name in front of buyers is obviously critical.
Two main approaches:
1. Someone else sells it for you
Afternic.com and Sedo.com are the two biggest "domain listing" sites. These are great places to get your name in front of many domain investors. For very good domains, Afternic has sales people that will help find buyers.
If it's a ...
10
You say that it's a good business for someone to purchase and grow, yet, you have not substantially grown it yourself. This will be a huge alarm bell to any potential purchaser. After all, if it's "that easy" to grow it, you would have done so already.
If you really want to sell it and get a good price for it, I would recommend that you start marketing it ...
8
Ideas are a dime a dozen. They are worth very little, it’s the execution that’s worth it’s weight in gold! So if you don't have time to 'execute' it then it's not sellable at all.
How would you sell it anyway? As soon as you mention your business plan to someone nothing stops them from implementing it straightaway (without giving you anything).
Also how ...
8
It is exceedingly rare for big companies to respond to unsolicited, incoming email from people that they have never met. You are much better off trying to get an introduction to the company from someone you know.
You may want to start at LinkedIn. One of your business contacts may already know someone at the big company, and LinkedIn will find this. It's ...
7
I can understand why you have received no offers.
Your auction page indicates you have no sales, no customers, no web traffic, and you want a minimum bid of $16,000. On top of that you indicate your application could be created by another programmer for a few thousand dollars. Why would anyone pay you $16,000 when they could contract the product out for a ...
7
To value the company you need to look at a variety of things. Generally, a company gets bought for 1) it's technology, 2) it's customers, or 3) it's revenue. ...or some combination of those. The value of your company is what someone is willing to pay for it. So, the value will be different depending on why another company wants to acquire your company.
...
6
There are three things that make a site valuable:
Traffic and search rank. If you have a lot of traffic and a high ranking for popular search terms, it makes your site worth money.
Development Value. The value from a development perspective is based on the time it would take someone else to develop an equivalent site, and the maintainability and platform ...
6
You may as well just list it and find out. Flippa.com and WebsiteBroker.com are both established marketplaces for selling / buying websites. You can set a reserve price, similar to an eBay auction, to ensure you're not obligated to sell it for $20 just because you listed it.
Selling without any content or traffic will be tough. The more market research you ...
6
My advice:
A commercial PHP framework might be a tough sell. The most popular frameworks (Zend, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Kohanna, etc) are all open source. In fact, I don't think I've even seen a commercial PHP framework. I suspect that you'll have a hard getting traction because of that.
Because of that, you should consider making the framework open source ...
6
First, offer to sell it to your current partner.
There are various ways this could happen from a simple he pays you X right now and you give your full interest in the company to your partner. Another way I saw recently was one partner gave up their interest while the second partner agreed to pay them X dollars a year for 3 years. This helped with cash ...
5
Generally, the price is whatever the market wil bear - so rather than picking a multiple, I'd recommend looking to find the going rate for similar sized sites, and then determine if there are extenuating circumstances (which would modify the price).
Check out Flippa (the site formerly known as SitePoint's market place). It's a website dedicated to the ...
5
Here are a couple of metrics people use for evaluations:
1x Yearly Revenue: If it's a brick and mortar type place with slow growth. That's kind of your baseline.
Money In: Again, a baseline. You don't want to go below this if it's a growing business.
7x Yearly Profit: You can also do some projections for 2, 3 and 5 years out and use the range. Typically, ...
5
Perfectly reasonable.
Be up-front. Make it clear that for the reasons you state, it would only make sense to develop the conversation if the prospective buyer covers your out-of-pocket expenses regardless of the outcome. If they are serious, you are giving them a fair choice. If they choose not to progress on those terms, you haven't shut the door to ...
4
I've looked into selling my business, and while I didn't do it, here's what I learned.
There are two types of buyers for businesses. The first is a financial buyer, the second is a strategic buyer.
The financial buyer is buying your business based on the numbers your business is currently producing. Private equity firms fall into this category. The ...
4
I'd look at it from the point of view of the companies who might buy you out in x years time. They either want to do one of two things:
Remove you from the market because they are losing too many customers to you.
Add your product to theirs because you add useful features, you have higher growth and you open up new markets for them.
(1) is quite a ...
4
Asset Sale of IP
Selling the IP if you created it will cause you to be hit with personal income tax with a top rate of 35% for the full amount of the IP, since self-created IP has a basis of zero.
Stock Sale of the S Corp
Selling the stock of the S Corp will be less because: 1) Your basis may be higher in the S Corporation shares because you had to put ...
4
I would valuate your share from a pure financial perspective. (this is how venture capital firms calculate.)
Step 1.2.3.
Valuate the entire business
discount the share price because you lose one founder
split in half
(I assume 200k/year is net earning.)
1.
Two methods: comparative , discounted cash flow
A. Comparative ---
How much does a similar ...
3
Jack, opening 2 identical questions is uncool, it works against how this discussion platform was designed.
Assuming you are not a troll, you seem ... lethargic, sad, possibly depressed. I really think you should have a deep talk with your loved ones, and discuss seeing a psychiatrist.
Regarding your question; no, I generally don't see business people cheat ...
3
"At what point is a startup “sellable”?"
a Product is sellable at each point, from idea to market established product.
a Startup is sellable when you have startup.
So, the question is "When we have a startup". My guess is that you have a startup when you have product working, or at least some half cooked product or prototype.
3
I've had at least 3 product ideas today, but that actually means nothing.
Anyone can have ideas but not everyone can execute. Execution is hard, like really hard.
Building the product
Branding
Building team
Finding money
Finding customers
Marketing
Administration
Persevering when you encounter that inevitable bump in the road
Etc etc....
Its ...
3
I think there are two basic steps in coming up with business opportunities.
STEP ONE: BUSINESS IDEATION
The first step is to come up with a list of possible business ideas. Here are some techniques for business ideation:
The Problem & Solution Method - Look at the world around you and seek out problems without solutions, or with poor solutions. If ...
3
That would appear to be fairly profitable. Have you considered having someone else run it so that you have a steady income on the side while you pursue something else?
As for selling it:
competitors - always potential buyers
large sites specific to your niche - (assuming you specialize in something like wordpress, drupal, or some other cms)
industry ...
3
It's all about asking the right questions.
Let's take an example of a trade booth at an Cookie Expo. Hundreds of people walking past every hour, many stopping and looking in... how do you filter who's really interested in buying your "Crunchy Chip Choco Bons" wholesale?
"Hi, are you interested in cookies?" - Bad question... why the hell are they at the ...
3
It's not the culture of PHP developers to pay for frameworks.
And it's certainly not a CEO decision to pick, or give a crap about code frameworks.
CTO, CIO - maybe - but often times the actual developers advocate for certain frameworks to be used. So you have to come from the bottom up with a framework not the top down in an organization.
If you want to ...
3
A very popular site to sell existing websites is https://flippa.com/ if you look at their Just Sold section and sort by price you'll see websites which sold for over a million dollars. Your best bet is to find similar websites see what they sold for. If non exist find websites generating similar revenue, see what proof was given such as verified Analytics ...
2
I did exactly this -- we sold off 4 of our 6 products.
The best target to acquire the products are your own customers, because they already understand your products both technically and (sometimes) from a marketing point of view.
Sometimes selling your software makes sense, but more likely it's folks who used to work for one of your customers but who are ...
2
In the deals that I have been involved with, the parties usually found each other by introduction from the hardware vendor that there was an opportunity to purchase the software outright or offload some of the support.
The transitions took varying lengths of time and there was always a seller support clause for a period of time (6-12 months) at some ...
2
At the end of the day an experienced buyer will look at the total profit (via the EBITDA) the site can make for the next three or so years (after that it's all a guess anyway) and base a valuation on that.
If you can successfully defend the 4-months history and show how "it will continue and/or increase for the for seeable future" then you'll be a valuable ...
2
Anywhere from 1 month to 9 months, depending on the following:
Managements desire to do the deal (on both sides)
Funds for the deal are in place
You can agree upon a price and terms
Due diligence shows no surprises
The costs vary depending on the deal size and the amount of lawyer time. I would recommend you put a cap on it during your negotiations. As ...
2
Focusing on an exit and on making yourself attractive to competition is likely to cause you to miss the boat on making a product and business that users want. As others have said - this is the wrong priority and wrong focus.
You can think about it, but don't make plans for any of it. None of it is likely to happen - most plans get blown out of the water ...
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