Sold a Side Project
by Mubashar IqbalLast week I agreed to the sale of a side project I built last year during a hackathon.
For Sale By Maker is a free site that allows users to post products featured on Product Hunt for sale on the marketplace, was acquired by Micro Acquire.
The bulk of the negotiation happened over Twitter, and a Zoom call all on a rainy (for me) Sunday morning.
Spent time this past week doing the transfer to the new owner to complete the sale.
An interesting aspect was that I never monetized For Sale By Maker, and had never planned too (fortunately Micro Acquire also has no plan to do so!)
This made coming up with a price to sell for interesting, and I came up with a novel approach of selling for the price of a new laptop.
I published more details of the process on my blog:
For Sale By Maker: Sold By Maker
Happy to answer any questions...
-
3
How did they find you and your project?
-
3
Congrats!
Would it have changed anything if they had plans to monetize it?-
2
Not really for me. I don't have an issue with people charging for marketplaces like this, not something I personally wanted to do with FSBM, but I can see how it might work.
Monetizing can also introduce a lot of work (and perhaps expenses and legal headache), and if they are willing to put that work into the site, they should reap the rewards from that work.
-
2
Congrats!
What were the reasons you didn't want to monetize?-
1
There are basically 2 ways to make money on this kind of site:
-
Charge people to list: I wanted to encourage people to list even if just curious to see if there was interest, so that rules this out.
-
Charge a fee on completed transactions: This is really complicated from a tracking, legal and financial position, and I wanted to avoid those complications and especially the liabilities.
-
2
- advertising?
-
1
Possibly, but I ruled it out because:
-
As a buyer and/or seller I didn't really want to see ads in the marketplace to clutter the experience, and distract from the marketplace listings
-
When you monetize with ads, you attention turns to getting more eyeballs so you can make more money, and distracts from maintaining the quality of people who are on the marketplace.
-
Not really sure who would want to advertise on the marketplace, lawyers?
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
Thanks!
Helping a friend wiith an MVP in the music space, and want to get back to the podcast space as well :)
-
2
If you need any help navigating the music space, I was a part of Grooveshark.com back in the day ~2007 (if anyone remembers us)
-
1
Oh very cool, will do! Definitely streamed my share of tracks on Grooveshark.
-
2
awesome! sometime I age myself talking about Grooveshark and it goes over people's heads but great to hear you used us back in the day.
please email me if I can be of any help navigating the music licensing world, it was a bear
-
-
-
-
-
2
@Mubs...this price, did you at least cover the costs you had? Because you didn't cover your labor. Still, congrats on the accomplishment!
-
1
Oh I think I probably covered both (depending on how much I wanted to charge myself on my hourly rate 😀)
Expenses
- Domain: $10/year
- Hosting: $5/month ($50)
I built the website during a hackathon and made a few small updates after the launch, I'd estimate I spent about 20 hours in total working on it.
So say the hourly rate was $100/h (I'd probably charge myself less 😀) the labor expenses are: $2k
I can't think of any other expenses I had.
Total expenses are: $2,060
-
-
2
Hi Mubs and congratulations!
What were other important considerations for you to sell, outside of the price? E.g., was it important to you if he wanted to keep it seperate or integrate it in?
-
2
My main consideration was trying to make sure we aligned on project goals. From my discussion with Andrew, he seemed to want to do the same as I had hoped, to give real makers a good place to sell their projects for a fair price.
Outside of that I wasn't too concerned about how they operated things, mostly because that can change at anytime, but the goals of the project are usually a little more locked in.
-
-
2
Great work Mubs
-
1
Thanks!
-
-
2
Congrats! And thanks for your detailed blog post.
-
1
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the post!
-
-
-
1
Thanks!
-
-
2
I am really interested in knowing which laptop did you bought with that money?
-
2
What valuation are you selling at? How do you find the price comfortable? Or you are just leaving the project to auto-pilot?
-
1
This was definitely a tough decision, especially since the site was one that was making any money, this was one those passion projects.
In the end I thought about my opportunity cost, what could I do if I didn't have to use any time for this particular project, what could I do with the cash from the sale, which is what led me down the laptop route.
-
-
2
CG, and thank you for sharing this remarkable milestone.
-
1
Thanks!
-
-
2
Cheers 🥂 congrats on the achievement 👍
-
1
Thanks, appreciate it!
-
-
2
Nice one, congrats mate.
-
1
Thanks you!
-
-
2
Congrats Mubs
-
1
Thanks!
-
-
2
Congratulations and thanks for posting details on your blog!
-
1
Thank you, hope you enjoyed the read.
-
-
2
Huge congrats Mubashar! So excited to see what you build next!
-
1
Thanks and happy that FSBM is in good hands!
-
-
2
Cheers Mubashar.
-
1
Thanks!
-
