I setup http://FeedmailPro.com about a year ago. It's a freemium product that I built to meet my own needs.<p>The site is now being used by about 700 blogs, only about 20 of them are paying $10/month which covers hosting costs but isn't much money otherwise.<p>The site has the potential to be bigger, but I don't currently have time to work on it as I'm working full time at a y-combinator startup and FeedmailPro is just a side project. And I don't want to just leave support requests unanswered and stop maintaining the site as a good number of people are using it now.<p>So I'm not sure what I should do. Could the site be sold or donated to someone else? If so where would I list it for sale and how could I find someone trustworthy to take it over? I could just close up shop but it is being used by a number of people now who have come to depend on it. Merging the service into someone bigger like MailChimp would be another option if I could get a meeting with those folks and they were interested.<p>Any ideas?
Don't sell the app: If it's self-sustaining without taking up much of your time, charge for it!<p>For support-related tasks, find someone that will do the support for a percentage of the new revenue you realize with some version of the suggestion below.<p>Tell all your existing, un-paying customers that in 30 days, you're going to start charging $19.99/month for it, but if they sign up before the pricing starts, they're in for $9.99 (or $12.99--whatever floats your boat). Leave all your existing customers happy by not charging them more.<p>You could also consider an annual subscription model where they pay either $240 a whole year, or $199 if they sign up before the date of the price change.<p>A lot of your customers will say no and leave, but some will likely say yes and contribute to your top-line. Either way, you'll make more money than you're making now. Be sure to explain why you're charging: E.g.: I think the service is valuable and in order to keep it running, I need to charge something for it.<p>THEN, once you have more paying customers, you can either sell the app and charge more for it or sit back and have a pssive revenue stream.<p>UPDATE: @ barmstrong, If you're not interested in the above and decide you DO want to sell it, contact me and we can talk about me buying it from you.
If you want to sell it, create an auction on <a href="http://www.flippa.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.flippa.com</a><p>If you're asking more than $1000 for the site, only accept payment through escrow.com.<p>Flippa's the best marketplace there is for selling websites in the $50 to $250,000 range. I've sold several sites there in the past, including one for $90,000 which had several serious bidders. There are real buyers there.
Unless your site is profitable, selling it is not going to get you a fair profit for the time you have spent on it.<p>The cheapest investment for you is marketing. Use your favorite outsourcing site to hire a worker to create a list of sites that would benefit from your service. I'm guessing that how-to and news blogs would be your best customers.<p>With this list compiled send them all a template email telling them about what your product does for them. The ultimate goal being more paying customers which allows you to either sell it for a good price or hire someone to work on it for you.
I'd be interested if the business model were a little different. It seems like it's just a replication of Feedburner in its current iteration, but you have to pay for it after 1000 subscribers. I think there's another approach that would be both more intriguing as a business model and more compelling as a product, without changing the app itself very much. Interested in connecting? scottmagdalein@gmail.com
There's plenty of other reputable places besides Flippa to sell a website and some will probably get you a better price. There's a list here - <a href="http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2010/10/01/how-to-find-websites-for-sale-35-sites-ranked/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2010/10/01/how-to-find-websit...</a>
Wait....you pass-through your users' ads (from their blogs).. too bad you cannot get any of that ad-sense revenue (if there is anyway).<p>biz opp right there if you can attract more money-making bloggers
What ever you want to do it, do it quickly. As one of the paying customers, I don't want to grow my subscribers in there and have trouble later transferring to another service.