I'm curious to hear from people who buy or sell projects on sites like these about how they value the projects. I look at prices on sites like this from time to time, and no two of them seem to be valued according to the same principles. I'd be interested in participating in this market, but when the prices seem arbitrary like that I assume I'll end up a sucker, and stay out.

I am going to introduce a 2nd param - valuation (calculated by the team) which would be calculated by the algorithm. Buyer would have a choice if they want to consider our valuation or user's.

This is the rough idea tough, will try to get feedback on the same and improve it further.

Why not just get a 409A and post it with the listing?

What's a 409A and how does it work?

Sound's neat! I've signed up for your mailing list and will keep an eye out.

Valuation is a hard topic, at least four well know methods with lots of fuzzy parts. Sites like this require you do do your own diligence - which itself is hard work. It takes a lot of practice.

I bailed at the first engagement popup, sorry. That could be an item in the hamburger menu if people are looking for it

Removed!

I popped this open on my phone and I must say the browsing experience feels good. You really did keep it tight and simple. You’re on to something. But if you feel burnt out, now you have a place to sell it

haha yes!

Very neat website. I love that it gets you right into it with no presentation homepage.

Regarding the market system: why did you pick a lump price rather than a bidding system?

A few notes for improvement: the “My projects” page feels empty at first: it could use a call-to-action with a quick explainer and a button. The “Go home” button has an odd wording; maybe “Main page”? Clicking on the logo to go to the main page is a classic, but not everyone is used to it; adding a link from the hamburger menu could be good. The website pricing and the way to settle are a bit unclear.

Get rid of the email popup. Nobody wants that. Other than that, cool!

I was reading through some of the posts when the modal takeover happened and my natural instinct to close the page kicked in. I have so little patience for modals these days.

If you want some kind of delayed call to action maybe some kind of toast at the bottom would be better. As it is today I'm primed to abandon sites that do a full screen take-over while i'm reading.

From what I have seen the challenge with something like this isn't building the app, it is stocking one side of the marketplace and then the other...

Looks great though!

Some call it "chicken and egg problem". Classic of two-sided marketplaces!

What are usually the solutions to such problems with a two-sided marketplace?

- Start in a niche where you can lean on your own personal connections to kickstart the demand/supply side. Once you've established yourself as the best platform in that niche, go broader.

- Outsource/"borrow" supply from other people until you can bootstrap the demand side (eg: scrape/syndicate other marketplaces; subcontract services)

- Heavily incent the supply side of the marketplace (eg: offer a guaranteed base pay to subcontractors regardless of demand)

- Bootstrap the supply side yourself (eg: for a forum, use sockpuppet accounts to create the appearance of of a thriving community)

It's hard!

I like the bootstrapping idea... github projects may appreciate getting buyout offers out of the clear blue! And, submitted offers could be fed back into the valuation model for fine-tuning.

In this example, the OP could reach out to everyone who has listed a project on Micro Acquire, Flippa, and similar businesses acquisition marketplaces.

"Hey, I saw your listing on X. I wanted to invite you to list your project on Second Founder. We have X,XXX views per month. You don't have to do anything except create an account, and I'll migrate this listing over."

More like: “we have already copied your listing for you and it is live here: ... let us know your contact details and we will as them!”

The solution is posting this marketplace on a forum full of people who might like to buy and sell side projects

I like your UX! It's simple, clear, and fast. Thank you for focusing on usability :)

Some minor feedback:

- I wonder if the pre-revenue column should be left, and the >5k MRR should be right, so it goes from least expensive to most?

- Can the category dropdown be checkboxes (so you can choose more than one) and also have an "All" category if you're just casually browsing?

- Some measures of time might be useful, like how long a project has been active ("since 2019") and how long it's been listed for

- Could you please add some tooltips or similar to explain what MRP and MPP are? Just a one-sentence description like "Monthly recurring profit is ____, as reported by the company/calculated by our algorithms/whatever".

These are very valuable points, thank you!

Adding them to the roadmap.

You should add ability to search projects by type of code used. Eg I specifically went to see if any Django projects were for sale and theoretically would be interested depending on what was there, but no way for me to search it. Cool idea tho

Ahhh this is a great idea

this is on the roadmap, will add it soon!

I am going to add this to my list of side projects selling platforms!

Please share that list with everyone.

Here we go from my notes: MicroAcquire (favorite of mine), Flippa (favorite of mine), Empire Flippers, Motion invest, Investors.club, BuySellEmpire, Quiet Light Brokerage...

Sure please do!

How is the project making $399 per month while asking for $20,000? Is such an asking price accurate?

Something making currently $399 a month should be pretty easy to scale up in the right hands.

The devil is in the details. If the project has taken a couple of years to reach $399/month, growth is incredibly slow.

I mostly use these sites to get ideas.

> If the project has taken a couple of years to reach $399/month, growth is incredibly slow.

Some folks who make good side projects make little or no effort in growing them. A professional marketer can often scale these quite easily.

That said, this strikes me as an unreasonably large multiple unless there is a juicy market, a moat, and little or no competition.

What if I told you that it has been making that much money for the past 8 years and likely to keep making money for the next 10, 20 years?

Still irrationally expensive. You need 4 years to break even and then you may make another 20k in 4 years. 8 years full of risk to make a profit of 20k while the platform is going to be 16 years old? Not worth it.

but this is the exact multiple most SaaS are using, what makes mine different? I don't get it.

At least mine is making net profit, most SaaS trading on stock exchanges with the same multiples are losing money and unlikely to remain at current market caps if not already.

I hope you realize valuation of public companies has nothing to do with a random one person side project that's been up for a few years.

After looking closer at the business, it looks like they have 13 or fewer paying clients.

That’s quite fragile unless they have been long term clients, and this type of system has high transfer costs.

> I hope you realize valuation of public companies has nothing to do with a random one person side project that's been up for a few years

Four years of seller discretionary income is not an unusual sale price for small solo projects that have traction. Iirc, Patio11’s bingo card creator sold for something around this multiple.

That said, it’s unclear if this project has as much traction as others that sell for this multiple.

If there are only a few clients, especially if they are friends of the current owner, then the business is fragile.

but customers who have been with you for 8 years is the anti-thesis of fragility.

for instance, you could have a thousand customers but with low LTV (they cancel after a month or one off).

which is more fragile here?

You make a reductio ad absurdum argument and then treat it like it’s a completely reasonable comparison. It’s not.

You seem interested in getting some answers, so I will give you my two cents worth…

> but customers who have been with you for 8 years is the anti-thesis of fragility.

Sure. How many of your customers have been around 8 years? How did you acquire them?

> for instance, you could have a thousand customers but with low LTV (they cancel after a month or one off).

Since this is basically 100% MtM churn, this is not a viable SaaS business.

> which is more fragile here?

If you take the 1000 customer SaaS and make it a more reasonable 10% or even 20% churn, then your business is more fragile for sure. We have no idea what might cause people to churn in your business because the n is so low. With 1000 customers, we can probably find some reasons (possibly before even buying) for the churn and halve it, thereby doubling LTV.

So questions I would have for you if I were serious about purchasing:

1. What’s the TAM?

2. What’s your moat?

3. How did you acquire your customers (esp. the 8 year ones)? If it’s a personal relationship, that is very bad, since they may leave when you aren’t the owner.

4. How many of your customers are new (1 year or less)?

5. What marketing have you tried?

6. What is the language of communication with these customers?

7. Where are your customers located (country)?

So after a quick glance with only the information you have given so far, I would probably be willing to pay $5k for a business like this and give it to an intern to develop. At $10k, I would be tempted to have one of my programmers make a copycat and just compete. As such, we could probably meet in the middle at $7-8k. This is probably a bad deal for you.

More information could increase or decrease this price.

Note that my biggest concern would be that all of the customers could instantly jump ship after you leave, because they were only customers because of you. This may seem odd to you, but I’ve seen entire business that make ridiculous amounts of money for the owner(s) exist purely because of personal connections. How do I know that this is not the case for you business? Since you have so few paying customers, I can’t even be sure that an answer you give me is true.

My totally unsolicited advice to you is to find a young and competent SaaS sales person and offer them 50% rev share (maybe with a 2 year cap). This allows you to grow your business with relatively little grunt work, and you get to keep the cash cow. Selling cash cows is almost always bad unless the money completely lacks significance, and then you should look more for a competent owner to hand it off to rather than optimizing sale price.

I will be happy to answer more questions if you have them.

Best of luck!

No you laid it out pretty damn well, this is very useful. thank you

but at $399/month x 12 = 4800 USD / year (since 2014) is nearly 40k USD.

also tough to get an intern to copy anything other than the landing page

It doesn't make sense to throw out an offer like 5000. Even at 20,000 its a tough sell because you know that by not selling you will still collect that around year 4.

Now multiply this by a factor of 100 and you will see why from my perspective it would be a tough to accept an offer with only a year.

It makes no sense to sell a business at 10xMRR because of very high probability that it would collect that in 10 months and likely continue to do so.

So imagine now I am doing 39,999 a month, would I accept an offer of 400K? Hells to the no, it will make that in a year (accounting for churn).

I really doubt there's people who would accept this offer unless there is serious looming problems to the business.

Something like 160 x MRR would be justified here, especially if your revenue has been predictably stable for the past 8 years, its like to continue another 8 years and another 8 years is my thinking.

Basically my situation is, I don't make enough to raise cash and hire people (no need one man automation) and turn it into a company nor desire to do so. If I want to sell it I will lose cash flow.

Ideally without this inflationary macro environment you would sell it up front for a very large multiple of MRR and invest somewhere but that is no longer an option it seems.

high probability of being in business for another 16 years :

40k MRR X 160 = 6400000

but the buyer would try to convince me that it won't happen (it will as its a sticky product that solves a real world pain) and will low ball me to accept $27MM this year and try to break even at year 8.

Even if inflation reaches past 15% I would have cash flows that could be adjusted and pass on the cost to my customers. By accepting a lump sump, I would be chump

You have misquoted me and moved the goal posts quite a bit. I think you are trying to justify your multiple, and so far nothing you have said has done so.

To address some specific points:

> also tough to get an intern to copy anything other than the landing page

I am guessing $10k worth of programmer time should be able to replicate your app. That’s about a month or two of very good European programmer time. I don’t know how long it would take since I don’t know this product well, but I’m guessing it’s not a long time (and maybe as low as a week). The website would take a day or two max (this I’m confident about).

The intern would be a marketing intern, and yes, a good marketing intern could do a lot with a small product like this. I would expect the MRR to go from 3 digits to 4 digits at least. The amount just depends on who the market is (again, I don’t know the market).

> It doesn't make sense to throw out an offer like 5000. Even at 20,000 its a tough sell because you know that by not selling you will still collect that around year 4.

Agreed. This is why I said it was a bad deal for you, and you shouldn’t sell your cash cows.

> Now multiply this by a factor of 100 and you will see why from my perspective it would be a tough to accept an offer with only a year.

Lololol… you just moved the goal posts.

In order to get to 40k a month, either you have a lot more customers (thereby lowering the likelihood that they are all friends and family customers) or your price is much, much higher (which means enterprise sales).

Either of these de-risks your business quite a bit. That de-risking is worth a higher multiple.

That said, you can’t just hand-wave your revenues to 100x and assume everything else is the same. It won’t be.

> its like to continue another 8 years and another 8 years is my thinking

I would bet that you think wrong.

For reference, 16 years ago, smart phones as we currently know them barely existed. The iPhone had not yet been released.

The tech landscape will most likely change drastically over the next 8 years, and almost certainly over the next 16. Your service might be obviated.

At best, it will be able to pivot to the new tech, but that will essentially be a new product at that point, and only the relationships with the few customers you have would be worth anything (and that’s one good salesperson away from being taken from you).

> Basically my situation is, I don't make enough to raise cash and hire people (no need one man automation) and turn it into a company nor desire to do so.

I don’t think you need to raise cash or hire people.

You either need to cowboy up and start doing some marketing, or you need to partner with someone who will do it for you.

As I mentioned before, a rev share is fine. That’s not an employee. That’s pure commission.

I don’t know how that would work in Europe, but affiliate deals are a thing.

> Even if inflation reaches past 15% I would have cash flows that could be adjusted and pass on the cost to my customers.

Yep.

I forgot to mention in my first reply… you should probably raise your prices if your customers love it so much.

Start now.

As inflation increases, raise them more.

> By accepting a lump sump, I would be chump

Yup. This is exactly what I said.

Don’t sell your cash cows.

Your best hope to sell is to find some executive retiree who wants to dabble in business to keep themselves busy, and the price you’re asking is a meaningless amount to them.

If you are serious about selling, I would talk to FEI:

https://feinternational.com/

They are a SaaS market place, and they will give you an honest evaluation of the value of your SaaS. They are motivated to get deal flow at prices that owners will sell at and buyers will buy at — they have a good feel for market price.

If your SaaS can actually pull $20k-25k (minus fees), they have access to buyers who will pay it.

I’m guessing that they will say that your business has too many vulnerabilities to be sold at that price (possibly any price above dev time), but I would love to be wrong about that.

Best of luck!

SaaS multiples are predicated on a lot of metrics. Growth, revenue retention, CAC and LTV, etc. If you had good metrics you would be making a lot more than $400/mo because you'd be growing like crazy.

The fact it only makes $400/mo after 8yrs is a negative signal, not a positive one.

This. The fact that it only grew to 400/mrr after 8 years means that the word of mouth is not very good, which is a signal that the product is not very good. You shouldnt HAVE to spend money on marketing to grow the product* if you have initial customers like you do.

*up to a certain point.

what if it was 40,000?

If you're calculating a multiple MRR alone is pretty useless, no matter how high it is.

Probably off by a factor of 5-10

Nice! As an aside, could you please improve the error message for "password length invalid" - took me a few tries to figure out how short it has to be. Best of luck!

oops sorry about that, fixing it now!

How did you handle design stuff? It looks pretty good! I'm a programmer without design training and always end up using Bootstrap.

I just use tailwindcss and get some inspiration from Dribbble. :)

Thank you for your kind words

Nice site. Clean design. Like that you used tailwindcss and Dribbble.

Was hoping for a site that allows you to search the technology stack used to create a project (i.e. search for React apps that are for sale).

Congrats!

Interesting, and congrats on launching!

On the one hand it sounds nice for me to be able to sell a side project and have finality. But also I've never had the patience to actually advertise/monetize them, so the valuation a pre-revenue service would get is too low for me to accept the sunk-cost fallacy. I suppose that's the small-project catch 22

Please put this platform on the platform and enforce that the buyer has to do so as well, contractually. Infinite inception.

Couldn’t agree more - current solutions are way over complicated. As someone who develops iOS apps on the side, I’ve always been looking for (but never found) a simple solution for offloading some of my projects. I will certainly be submitting some projects here this morning! Thanks!

I will be more than happy if this project helps you in any way :)

Looks really neat! Some ideas/questions/suggestions:

1 Are you taking a fee on sales completed through the platform? Couldn't find this at a quick glance, but it's important info.

2 Did you look into legal / liability aspects regarding the veracity of expense / revenue / profit claims? Do you vet projects/owners before listing them? How do you ensure that the offer is legit (ie the seller actually owns the project)?

3 Does the platform facilitate safe transactions (eg deposit access credentials / purchase price in an escrow service)?

4 Any reason that only sellers can post a public ask price? Using eg a second-price public auction system could make sense here.

Happy to support btw, feel free to reach out, contact info is in my profile.

Annoying subscribe pop-up. Bye!

removed popup. Hii!

No thanks, my side projects exist to bring me joy. Corrupting them by trying to monetize them would take away all the fun.

I'm sure some people feel this way and others feel differently. If it's not for you it's not for you—no need for a snarky comment

Yeah side projects are like therapy but there are people who are trying to make a living from side projects and end up selling them for quick money.

Nice, just submitted my game Qubes. There were some people trying to buy it from mean few months ago but the offer was low.

The game right now is free to play with no ads, so it generates no money. But it has over 7k installs, which is pretty neat.

Sounds like the name/domain is a bit misaligned from what the actual purpose is.

The name hints at finding a co-founder, while you describe it as a platform for selling projects (transferring the project from one founder to another)

Hi, I'm the 2nd Founder of SF. We have identified this potential arena and been discussing expanding our ways to help project owners find that 2nd Founder, and not just a platform to sell a side project. Thanks for the validation.

how do you solve the lemon problem?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lemons-problem.asp

I've used SideProjectors in the past. It's probably one of the more established ones.

https://www.sideprojectors.com

Congrats on launching and site looks and works great. Care to share the stack you built it / are hosting it on? Always curious to hear the technical details :)

Nice. What happens, when a potential buyer finds a project he wants to buy? Do they just get the contact details of the seller, or do you also manage payment?

The plan is to integrate escrow and make the entire flow seamless.

This is great. What are the current solutions that you find over complicated? You could reach out to posters there to get more projects onto your platform.

I am sending messages to the posters, hopefully will get few listings by next week :)

Might check the ToS of the existing players before doing that en masse.

existing players might have works not yet submitted to current platform, even if ToS is a jerk

i'm surprised there isn't a market for software already.

Being able to price a stack would probably let software developer get easier access to funding or borrowing since at least you'd have some way to use the code as a collateral.

it would probably also helps developers develop products using more decomposed, standardized and documented components (to facilitate selling them in parts) which is always a really good thing.

There's several. microacquire.com is one, I'm sure I've seen others.

it looks like microacquire sells company, not software pieces. Did i miss something ?

Any difference from IndieMaker (https://indiemaker.co)?

How do you validate the revenue is authentic?

The page is very confusing to me because it looks like a Trello/Kanban board.

You are aware of microacquire.com?

I think you meant microacquire.com , you forgot the 'c'. The domain you're linking to is hella scammy.

Haha I've never seen a site require you to install a chrome extension to visit

Indeed thanks for the correction.

Very cool, do you do any vetting / background checks of the projects that are submitted?

yes I manually go thorough the projects and contact with the poster if there is something wrong

needs pictures

model it after the already successful site that exists for this (flippa)

if you want to compete with it you must at least match it first

then you need to find a way to have an advantage over them (one way would be to curry favor with users here)

Disagree, don't chase the features of a competitor. Find the features your customers need and the features you can build better than others. We don't need another flippa clone.

Just submitted my project! :)

It's live on the website

RSS would be nice to have, don’t want to give my email to anybody ;)

are there any speicifc solutions you have found over complicated in this space?

- not showing listing before logging in - Not showing actual PROFIT LOSS STATEMENT numbers - Wanted to switch to monthly recurring profit from MRR

How do you factor in a founders time in that profit equation?

Let’s say the solo founder spends 80 hour a week running sales marketing ops dev and then sells. He could artificially make his profit high if he isn’t billing for his time

Good job! Looks great.

Excellent idea!

Thanks Man!

Nice

Can someone give the TL;DR here? What kinds of projects go on here?

Mostly one-man band MVP's, side-hustles, Apps, sites with or without revenue/profit that is looking for a 100% buyout.

We will be expanding to connect project owners with 2nd Founders looking to join, and not just do a buy out.

~ 2nd Founder of SF

I tried to make a listing, but it kept saying to keep description under 280 characters, even though it was.

Anyway if someone wants to make me an offer for the domain and text content of Candy Japan (candyjapan.com), email me. Gets ~2000 clicks on Google per month, 7000 uniques. It's the oldest Japanese candy subscription box domain on the internet, but the service itself hasn't been running for 2 years.

I'm really going to miss the behind-the-scenes year-end posts about Candy Japan! I've been reading them for a decade or so? I hope you'll keep blogging and sharing what you're up to, but even if not, thank you for all those fascinating glimpses into the finances and numbers behind a fun product.

can you send the description here please?

# Description

Japanese candy subscription box. Includes domain and right to use text content only. Specifically does not include any code, customer list, or anything else.

# Asking price.

$6942

# Why sell?

It's the oldest candy subscription box domain in the world! And there's old content with decent backlinks as well. In other words: Google likes it.

I used to run this subscription box, but shut it down after Covid made global shipping impossible. If it's extremely low effort for me, then I would be willing to sell the domain and site content to someone who wants to start a similar site, or to use as lead generation for a competing service.

I am selling this site, because I know it still has value.

Despite the service being down for 2 years, the site still gets ~2000 clicks on Google each month, and ~7000 unique visitors. From past experience, this would convert to a few (let's say 5) new paying subscribers each month with no marketing at all. With an LTV of ~$40, should have lead generation value of at around ~$2400/year.

But I won't set up your website for you. I'll just transfer the domain to you, and sign a poorly worded document telling that I allow you to keep using the site content.

You will not get the code. Because it's terrible, and I don't want you to punch me or have even a remote risk of having to set it up for you or maintain it.

You will get the rights to use the blog text content, but you'll have to copy paste them yourself from the website. Because they are in some bizarro combination of two different formats in a database I barely remember how to log in to.

Again, you only get: the domain name, and the right to use the blog content text. But no right to ask me time-consuming questions. After I have transferred the domain to you, I consider my work to be 100% done.

# Competition?

The Japanese candy subscription box scene is admittedly intensely (ridiculously?) competitive. See here for a full list: https://www.candyjapan.com/wow/japanese-candy-boxes

Candy Japan was a big deal on HN for a while. Hope you get a good price! You should consider posting to microacquire, if you haven’t already, I had a good experience posting my company there (I didn’t sell it ultimately but had some good conversations with real buyers). And maybe do a show HN to say you’re selling - I bet a lot of folks remember the service!

You can try posting now from your official email, it will work just fine :)

OK tried it. Still had to shorten the reason to 500 characters.

> # Asking price. > $6942

Lol, intentional I assume?