Is it possible to exit without generating revenue?
Hey everyone.
The title of this post is a question I've been asking myself: can I sell my product, Dev Resources, even though I make (almost) no money from it?
Yes, the product needs to add some value to the buyer, and what it has to offer is:
- 1400+ registered users
- 1700+ newsletter subscribers
- ~200 visitors/day
- almost 500 GitHub stars
- 300+ Discord members
- 2000+ Twitter followers
- 1 GitHub sponsor (25 USD/month)
These numbers aren't bad but are they enough for someone to be interested in buying and running the project?
I got one person to pay for featuring their product on the homepage and even had 3 GitHub sponsors at a point in time, but somehow I find it hard to keep the project going while working 9-5 and thinking of how to go about creating a new project, so maybe exiting would, depending on how much, give me the runaway for adventuring myself once again.
Would love to hear what you guys think, or if you've been through the same situation before.
Stay well!
Hi , i bought a project comparable to this , in a worse shape for about 1000 usd a few years ago , i think yours will be worth about 3000 to 5000.
The worth is in the backlinks it can give to people who are linkbuilding (if not nofollow)
and the seed of the community , not sure on your engagement.
by the way , i requested to add remotists.com to your list , a service i run
Thanks for sharing it.
The project currently has 800+ backlinks because it's often listed on blog posts, GitHub repositories, etc., so I guess that's something I could also leverage.
Nice, I'll soon add Remotists to it. :)
He's saying the value isn't necessarily in the money it's making but in the link juice it can provide to those who take it over and link out to their other properties to give an SEO boost.
Sometimes is not what it is, but what it can be.
I have some experience in angel investment and business acquisition but not a ton. So that's my background haha.
We always looked at MRR and monthly/yearly profits when acquiring a business. Without any revenue, you're not going to be able to sell the business for any meaningful amount. Maybe you could pay your rent for a few months if you're lucky but that's it.
Most acquirers want to take over a business that's already making money/profits because they can anticipate that continuing. If it's not making money now, it means an acquirer would have to strategize and execute the monetization model and wait for revenue/profit down the line that might never come, so it's a much bigger risk (and much more work).
Others here have said you should keep working on it. Some of your other numbers look good so I don't disagree. If you are thinking about selling in the future, make it your highest priority to monetize it effectively while still respecting your users, email list, etc. If you can even get it to $1k-$5k MRR, it will make it much more attractive to potential buyers.
Some ideas off the top of my head are a premium membership, premium dev resources and more advertisements, more affiliate sales 💡
You got this, Marcel!
Thank you for all these insights! 🙏
To some extent, I already tried almost all monetization options you mentioned but saw little return from it, so in the end, it was too much work for too little revenue.
I see a big potential on the email subscribers we have, and that's an area I have explored just a little, so I guess I'll try and focus on it next.
Thank you for the motivation!
No problem, Marcel!
If you feel like you've given it a go with all of these models and not seen much success, it might just not be in the cards. I'm all for persevering when there's a light at the end of the tunnel but a good indie hacker also knows when the time's come to call it a day.
If you haven't already, try just talking with your audiences. In Discord, via email, etc. What do they want? What will they pay for? Be honest that you want to turn it into a business and want to monetize things in a way that will respect them. Hopefully that should give you some insight.
Good luck!
Thank you for the suggestions, Joe.
I'll try to reach out to the audience, maybe add some survey on the website, and try to get some answers.
Good call, Marcel! This is what I would do. Hope you get some helpful feedback.
I've heard about zero revenue SaaS businesses getting acquired on https://microacquire.com/ - maybe give it a shot!
+1 for Microacquire for this type of thing. I previously sold a SaaS product there making virtually no money but the buyer saw the value in the user base it had and was much better suited growing it than I was.
Gonna have a look at it, thanks for pointing it out!
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I just finished adding new infrastructure and frontend to it, and auth + bookmarking are almost ready to go, but all of it took quite a lot of my time.
Now that the project is at a good place tech-wise, it'll be easier to add new features and explore more, like adding blog posts, weekly digests and whatnot.
The traffic is constant for ~1 year now, mostly from Google and YouTube, and I'm sure there's room to go further.
So yeah, I think you're right, maybe it's best to work a bit longer on it and put it in an even better place before trying to exit.
And thanks for pointing out the performance issue, I'll move that to SSR asap, so hopefully this will help.
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