Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

&gt; Giving your project to a stranger on the internet is risky, so we used escrow.com to make the transfer.<p>I sold a website on Flippa once. The buyer put the money on Escrow.com, I transferred everything over, and they went AWOL. What I found out is that there is no straightforward way to obtain the funds when it happens. Apparently there is no way at all except via the court system. Which would mean the only real protection Escrow gives is against the buyer going bankrupt (or using false identity, I suppose).<p>Fortunately, they came back several weeks later with some nonsensical excuse and closed the transaction, but I will never use Escrow.com again.

<i>Buyer: I think I could come up to maybe $7500 but that’s about it.</i> .. then later: <i>Buyer: Ok at $10,500 we have a deal.</i><p>I&#x27;ve sold a few projects in my time, but this conversation makes me think I should really look at having an agent represent me in future. The whole &quot;I can only offer $7500&quot; but then that turned into a $10500 sale just goes over my head - the communications skills needed are next level, and I&#x27;ve read <i>Getting to Yes</i> and such books :-) Maybe having someone less emotionally attached to a project could work in negotiations to increase the price to far more than cover their fee?

I appreciate how open the dev is being and I like the article! But I have a moral annoyance towards username squatting, especially by folks who don’t actually participate in the network…

A little OT but for anyone with experience - is the negotiation depicted realistic &#x2F; typical? The final selling price is over twice the buyer&#x27;s initial offer and almost 150% of what they said at one point is their max. I know it&#x27;s a textbook negotiation but (obviously not having too much experience negotiating) I never thought that&#x27;s <i>really</i> how they work in real life.

This is very interesting. I only really heard about these billion dollar aquisitions like Slack, I didn&#x27;t know that there is an online marketplace for buying startups in the range of a few thousand dollars. That&#x27;s awesome!

I do see an increasing number of projects being posted on my little website too<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sideprojectors.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sideprojectors.com</a><p>The original premise of SideProjectors was to buy and sell small indie projects. Over the years, I&#x27;ve seen many many of these small projects (often ecommerce shops, dropshipping businesses, but at times quite interesting ones too) being submitted.<p>As a side note (pun intended) - I&#x27;ve been also watching out for off-the-shelf template softwares that are being posted and making sure they are filtered out. As an example, you can buy a &quot;Privacy respecting Google Analytics Alternative, launch your own SaaS&quot; from themeforest for $49, repackaged and being sold in many places. Their pitches are usually similar.. &quot;hey, I developed this, but haven&#x27;t had time to do marketing, it has so much potential, just need someone to take over and start making that passive income&quot;.

Any advice on actually finding the idea that is worth doing? I have a notion page with 20+ tiny ideas, but I still don&#x27;t find any of them encouraging enough to spend time on. How to overcome this very first step?

&gt; Could I pump out tiny SaaS starter projects and sell them at $10k+ a pop?<p>Honestly I&#x27;d probably never trust a business doing this. From my POV they&#x27;re probably just after cash from a buyer, not a good place for my data.<p>I know I&#x27;m probably an outlier though, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve seen anyone else note a lack of privacy policy on the names one for example

I wonder how viable a sort of &quot;micro PE&quot; firm would be, basically a company that just buys many of these micro indie projects with positive cash flow with the goal of holding on to them for profit or investing into their operations and eventually reselling them.<p>There&#x27;s been this trend of new firms popping up that acquire small ecommerce brands (in fact, there was one on HN just the other day). I&#x27;m wondering if the same model can (or has) been applied to small &quot;indie&quot; companies and projects.

Seems like a pretty low ROI to me.<p>Generously, we&#x27;re talking about ~$100&#x2F;hour, my guess is it was actually a lot less than that, maybe as low as half or a third, and this is for an idea that got some traction.<p>That could be a good wage for some groups of people, but my guess is you&#x27;d find a much better one either a) growing something to a larger size or b) working for someone else.<p>If you&#x27;re really interested in building these tiny products though, then it could be a way to support yourself doing what you&#x27;re interested in. I just wouldn&#x27;t generalize this strategy to &quot;this is a good way to make a living&quot;.<p>On the flip side, I bet doing this sort of thing really sharpens the entrepreneurs skillset - identifying good ideas, quickly bootstrapping a product, and negotiating for funding, so I bet you&#x27;re getting some pretty big personal levelups as you go.

Where does someone in their early 20s get the capital to just up and start multiple ice cream shop locations, and simultaneously find the time to work on an array of random software &quot;projects&#x2F;ideas&quot;?<p>This whole thread seems really fishy.<p>The theme of an entire thread discussing building and selling businesses like it&#x27;s just something you can choose to do in your free time or not ...

This thread has an astroturf feel. I wonder who is making the money here and how?

We have a similar background. I do tiny projects on the side and I did ice cream for retail and wholesale. Pretty cool to find like minded individuals.

Just curious how do you find the market for your projects

So you&#x27;ve discovered domain squatting.

10k for that app seems insane.

Interesting that microacquire was used.<p>I struggle to take seriously a site that lists &quot;Our team&quot; as characters from Silicon Valley.

congrats on the emoji sale!