I'm the Director of Websites at Flippa.com, we're an online marketplace for buying and selling websites, domain names, and smartphone apps.<p>To date, we've signed up 900,000 users and have done over $180,000,000 in total transactions, and we've helped thousands of entrepreneurs sell their side projects :)<p>If you're looking to sell a side project, my biggest tips are:<p>1. Keep an accurate accounting of financials<p>2. Install analytics and ensure it is capturing data correctly<p>3. Be realistic about price expectations (ex. websites typically trade at 2-4x annual net profit).<p>If anyone has a website and is interested in getting a free professional no-obligation valuation, you can simply visit: <a href="https://flippa.com/deal-flow/sell" rel="nofollow">https://flippa.com/deal-flow/sell</a><p>I'm also happy to answer any questions people might have about selling a website, app or domain. You can contact me directly at joseph.carroll[at]flippa.com or you can simply respond to this thread.
"They’ll see the code, and if the code is shit, then you may be in trouble"<p>Has anyone EVER gotten "in trouble" for shit code? It's about 80-90% of everything I've ever come across in the last 15 years. And frankly, probably 50-60% of what I've produced in that time also falls in that camp as well. It's only been in the last 5-10 years that attention to code quality has <i>really</i> been on my radar, prompted in part because I've had to provide support on stuff I wrote 10-15 years ago and ... it really opened my eyes as to where I cut corners and the huge impact it can have.
Don't want to be too negative but the entire post could have been shortened to 'put it on Flippa'. Then, the other advice is quite obvious.<p>Flippa isn't bad but if your side project is good for anything and you want to achieve a better price, do a small M&A process: Identify potential buyers yourself, approach them and keep the approaches synced to create and keep up competition. Also you could combine this manual leadgen with Flippa.
Hello. I'm Eric and I run <a href="http://sideprojectors.com" rel="nofollow">http://sideprojectors.com</a><p>Thanks for listing it on your article.<p>I suppose unlike other sites, SideProjectors is completely free, so no cost for people to listing it and selling it.<p>Then the immediate question is "how do you make money?".<p>Well, I'm a developer and I run other businesses so, SideProjectors is... really my side project. And it has been for almost 4 or 5 years.<p>I started SideProjectors at a local hackathon where we won a prize from Freelancer! and it all started from there. It receives a constant flow of projects each day and a number of projects have been sold since it started.<p>In terms of getting the most amount of exposure, I think personally, the most important thing is providing as much detail as possible. It's likely to be featured on the front page, it will show people that you are serious about the project and if not being sold, people will at least message you asking many follow-up questions.<p>I've been meaning to add a bunch of features to SideProjectors, so hopefully it'll continue to improve!
I bought a number of side projects, its a nice way to get a validation of the market. I always like to see a number of paying customers even if it is just a few.
Would it be wrong to use a finance-textbook approach e.g. recurring revenue divided by a rate of return? (Or rate_of_return minus rate_of_growth, using the Gordon model.) For example, if I get 1k/mo in ads, dividing it by (0.25 / 12) would result in a sale value of 48k.<p>The rate of return must reflect of course the high risk of the investment (e.g. users may migrate to other app and revenue dwindles) and must also cover the costs of app maintenance (every major release of mobile app takes some maintenance in code, at least).<p>I used 25%/year as example but I am not really sure if it is too low (or too high). Fact is, not many investments yield 25%/year.
People interested in buying website should also look at <a href="https://empireflippers.com/" rel="nofollow">https://empireflippers.com/</a>.<p>P.S. I am not associated with them in any way.
Whenever I have a project, I have this insatiable itch to stick it on my Github. I love open source, so unfortunately I don't think I'll ever be able to sell something I make.
Anyone interested in selling their SaaS app? Mainly looking for / interested in projects generating between $10-35k in MRR. If so, shoot me an e-mail (in profile). That probably doesn't classify as a side project anymore, though..
I would love to buy someone's side project if there is negligible work to maintain it (although then why would you sell it). But still if someone just wants something off their plate.
I'd recommend using https for the sign up form to improve the conversion rate. Some people(like myself) would be more likely to join.<p>Free certificates available from letsencrypt.org (no affiliation).
Built basically the same thing when I was looking for a decent office chair (scrape craigslist and send me an email), though it lacked the nice front-end.