I'm selling Cheddar. The whole kit and caboodle — API, web and native apps, acclaimed code base and documentation, and 33,000+ user community — is being sold, not necessarily to the highest bidder.
33503 users, 2.61% are paying 'plus' customers, at, say $20/year = ~$18k in revenue. You'd need to grow and monetize that base a lot more to get back $125k purchase price.<p>I'm guessing someone might buy it, but there's a heck of a lot more ways you could spend $125k building a similar company to get to profitability faster. There's even more ways to spend $125k to make $18k/year. I'll happily let you invest in my company at $125k with returns of $18k/year for few years. :)
You're batshit crazy to try selling for this price. The most recent reviews suggest it loses data and isn't very innovative. I tend to agree. It's yet another fish in a sea of todo apps.<p>Your craftsmanship and attention to detail on the UI and experience are great. I'll give you that. But this is a todo application. Not only that, but it's open source. Hell, I've built it and run the iOS app myself.<p>The only thing you're selling is 33,000 free users (rather, a list of them, not necessarily 33k active pekple) and a Ruby on Rails app. You also said it requires 4 dynos to operate, plus a Postgres db. I'd imagine the reason you're selling this is that it's costing you $200 per month and not making anywhere near that.<p>While I'm grateful for everything you have done with cheddar in terms of transparency and sharing with the community: I think you shot yourself in the foot. Reverse engineering the back end (from the app and api docs) and rebranding the iOS app would take me 2 weeks tops.<p>$125,000? Good luck man. If you can get that.. You're an even better magician than you are a developer.
Your stats don't mention how much revenue Cheddar is generating. That's the most important metric for determining the price!<p>Nobody cares how many hours you put into something when determining price.
Based on your traction so far, this acquisition would be based on a revenue multiple, not as a strategic sale.
For a niche SaaS product like this one, I would expect a valuation of 12X-24X monthly revenue depending on growth rate. Is this product making about $10K a month now to justify the $125,000 price?
Take a look at some of the products on Flippa to get a sense of how much you could get.
Does he really charge $1000/hour or is it a joke I didn't get? <a href="http://hire.samsoff.es/" rel="nofollow">http://hire.samsoff.es/</a><p>edit: explanation <a href="http://soff.es/one-thousand-dollars-an-hour" rel="nofollow">http://soff.es/one-thousand-dollars-an-hour</a><p>By that rate and the 800-hour figure, Cheddar would be one of the most expensive apps ever (utility vs cost).
This is something I've experienced first-hand, and an <i>extremely</i> valuable lesson for people thinking about starting a startup. At a low average monthly cost (say less than $30), it's really damn hard to get enough people into your funnel for a reasonable cost of acquisition. And you need to reach a LOT of people for your service to be a significant source of long term income.<p>If you're about to start a startup, I'd strongly encourage you to come up with some hypothetical figures for these metrics:<p>* Number of monthly uniques<p>* Percentage that will convert to trial<p>* Percentage that will convert to paid<p>* Average monthly subscription cost<p>* Churn rate<p>* Cost of acquisition<p>You'll be way off, but run the numbers you've made up past as many experienced founders as you can, and you might be able to come up with a model that's semi-realistic. Of course it will evolve over time as you get some real data and more experience, but the main point of the exercise is to then ask yourself questions like: "How can I get X0,000 uniques to my marketing site on a $0 marketing budget?", and "What can I change about my product/positioning/target market so I can triple my average monthly subscription cost?".
Perspective.<p>When I read the original announcement for this app. It sounded cheery. The design is really pretty good.<p>Over time, though, I've learned to keep an eye on these announcements. Not just cheddar, but all of the 'check us out' posts. Sure enough, a lot of these do not succeed. Some even blog during their process, to share some epiphany. Building a successful product is hard. Filtering the noise on HN is hard as well. When I see a new announcement, I look at the 'good' in the product, but only time
will tell if the founders have hit the right mix.<p>Sam, the OP, is not one to hold back from backlash. He doesn't have too much pride. He shows his product on HN to ask for users. He isn't afraid to admit failure when it happens. He needs the money, so he asks for it. I'm sure there are hundreds in a similar spot. Yet, they will not make a similar post.<p>It is super important to see the lifecycle of projects here. It adds a good perspective to this community.<p>Back to Cheddar. Without a passionate founder, a product like this will die. It isn't a turnkey business. It will require much more product work to become a success.
To answer a question on the page: "I'm not sure how transferring apps from one Apple ID to another works. We can figure it out though."<p>I'm fairly sure this is impossible. I know people (with large apps and the right contacts) that have tried, and never heard of it being possible. Unless something changed recently. You could transfer the account (unless other apps are also on it).
>This price is $125,000. I think that's a steal for what you get... If you were to hire me or anyone else to make Cheddar for you, it would be much more expensive.<p>Not to be a jerk. I really wish you well. But I'm curious: it would cost over $100k to make a todo list app? I would think that would be one of the simplest apps you could possibly make. Am I missing something?<p>[hmm... didn't see that your rate was $1000/hour. That answers part of my question.]
This might be considered off-topic, but i find the VentureBeat post about Cheddar's sale (<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/05/cheddar-for-sale/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/05/cheddar-for-sale/</a>) really sad . The app is called a "cult classic" among "hackers and mac fans" and there's a disclosure at the end: it was written by the wife of Seesaw's founder (where Soffes currently works).
Talk to the guys at Asana or similar. If you could transition your 33k users to Asana or similar (through an upsell, conversion, etc) then they would be paying (roughly) $3.73 per acquiried user.<p>With an email address worth .60-.90 per month or more, they should be able to easily justify it. Just a thought
Just curious -- why are you choosing to sell it instead of holding onto whatever passive income it generates?<p>I love Cheddar, and judging by some of the sales data shown in the TechCrunch article it doesn't exactly look like it's bleeding money.
Sam - how's the $1000/hr consulting going? In your original post you mentioned that it was intended to supplement your income while working on Cheddar. Are you going to continue consulting now that you're selling Cheddar?
Just because I think this is relevant, here are the three founders talk(<a href="http://5by5.tv/founderstalk" rel="nofollow">http://5by5.tv/founderstalk</a>) podcasts Sam did:<p>Part1: <a href="http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/38" rel="nofollow">http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/38</a><p>Part2: <a href="http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/39" rel="nofollow">http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/39</a><p>Part3: <a href="http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/40" rel="nofollow">http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/40</a><p>They really are a great listen.
I am a Cheddar user with a free account and have to say that it really is a well designed, intuitive app.<p>Personally, while I really like Cheddar I do not feel that it is a service that I would ever pay a recurring fee for.<p>I am a pinboard, fever rss, and instapaper user and feel that all of these nominal one time investments were more than worth supporting these projects.<p>I could see paying a one time $30-$50 fee for Cheddar<p>It will definitely be interesting to see what happens.
Curious - are you selling because it's a flailing company with not enough revenue or because the growth is hard to handle on the development side of the company?