Ask HN: What's my profitable startup worth? (detailed stats provided)

Congratulations on your success thus far.<p>There are several pricing models one can use for small business valuation. In this case, your company earns revenue using advertising (AdSense and affiliate). Companies like this are priced differently from e.g. SaaS startups which are in turn priced differently from companies selling enterprise desktop software.<p>The industry standard for ad revenue companies is a 20-24x multiplier on the most recent (sustained, not outlying) monthly profits. Specifically, it would be the following:<p>(20..24(135&#x2F;12)) = 225 - 275<p>There is your answer. Your company would likely fetch between 225k (cheap) to 275k (expensive). Most folks on marketplaces like Flippa (which is where predominantly ad-revenue companies like yours are brokered) would value it as such.<p>There are other factors which can inflate the price of your company to maybe a 30x monthly profit valuation, but in general that will be the range. It&#x27;s good that most of your traffic comes from organic searches, advertising arbitrage is risky and often results in a downgrade.

Your startup is worth whatever it is worth to the buyer. This is a serious statement.<p>Unlike S&amp;P stocks, a small startup does not have many buyers looking into your valuation. What one buyer is willing to pay will vary widely from another.<p>A prospective buyer will consider things besides your revenue history. Such as operation risk, potential synergy, possible changes for growth, if you are a competitor, etc. Then there is their own financial situation, and the form you are willing to take payment (like stock vs. cash).<p>As a poor example, if I were to buy your site, I&#x27;d take your profit and discount taxes I would owe plus some salary for my time to upkeep it (another buyer could be more or less depending on their resources). So the profit would be down to say 80k.<p>From there, I note that there virtually is no growth in revenue despite the growth in pageviews. Assuming no way to fix the CPM, my worry would be whether I could get my money back, especially if there could be a real estate peak.<p>So average Joe like me might be willing to pay a paltry 1-3x multiple of profit* (and mostly because I don&#x27;t have much money to risk). A collector of web businesses might go up to 5x, as a guess, more if there is growth.<p>The best companies in the world (like S&amp;P companies) fetch anywhere between 10x to 20x+ so it&#x27;s highly unlikely you get that without exploding growth.<p>* By profit I mean after taxes and the acquirer&#x27;s expenses.

First, congrats, you did something that many of us fail at more than once. But in the end, you have a hobby business that is not really growing but only teetering so far, likely because as you said you aren&#x27;t putting in a lot of time and using it only as a side thing.<p>I really am not trying to be an ass, but I am trying to be honest based on my own experiences. Your business isn&#x27;t worth as much as you would like, although it is quite valuable in many ways. Simply put, you don&#x27;t have a $135k profit on revenue of $140k because you are discounting the real cost to run and grow the business which someone else will have to hire out at least a portion of, pay taxes on, pay state fees etc. So in reality, assuming the person is willing to assume at least 2-3 of the hats (business, finance and customer service) and hire out the technical then they may net $10-80k depending on if they hire contractors or a full time person.<p>At the same time like others already pointed out, it will boil down to how much is someone willing to pay. But outside of a corporation that finds your project attractive because of market fit, or leads or something along those lines, sophisticated individuals with cash will not pay major multiples for a business that is essentially only mildly profitable after they factor in costs to maintain and grow it. So your best bet is to sell to a corporation that has sunk costs already that is happy to take the extra revenue and leads and run.<p>Not saying you couldn&#x27;t get $150k to even at the high end $300k, but it will take a special set of circumstances. Otherwise, I&#x27;d say you are looking at more like a $60k-150k type of sale being far more likely.<p>No matter what, good luck and I hope you can maximize your benefit.

Just trying to understand the context better. What does your startup do in real estate? What is the revenue model? What is the affiliate revenue that you are able to generate?

I had 16M pageviews in 2015 and a hell of a lot less adsense earnings than you :( What&#x27;s your CPM?

patio11 sold his business through this site and said only positive things about it: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;feinternational.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;feinternational.com&#x2F;</a><p>Considering that it is worth how much someone is willing to pay, might be a great place to some benchmarking.

Did you include any hours you spent working on the business in the expenses?

I&#x27;m just curious, how long did it take you to get up to 5M page views?

Wondering how you go about achieving dramatic bounce rate reductions?

you might need a few more years of data to get a decent discounted free cash flow valuation.