Ask HN: Is it a good idea to sell my startup?

[gamebak]

I have been running my startup for a while, no seed funding and still was able get around ~$500 (ish) monthly profits.

Yet I was thinking that if I could sell it I would have more money to start something new plus to help me with my college.

I would like an advice from someone with more experience, should I sell my startup and attempt to create something else or focus more on my product?

Url: http://skyul.com

[jpetersonmn]

I actually would be in the market for your product. It's not so much the web design turning me off, it's that a 1 day trial costs me twice as much as it would to sign up for the service.

$2/day = $60/month.

I would suggest a way to get a free trial, for at least a week that's linked to a credit card or paypal account or something to keep people from just signing up for tons of free trials. Kind of like how Netflix or Hulu does it.

[brokenbeatnik]

How many hours a month would it take to run if you weren't focused on improving the product, just keeping the site running?

If the answer to that is a decent hourly rate, do that and then just start doing something else.

If it's not, and you aren't able to figure out growth, you may want to shut the doors, as I think it's not likely that you'll see a lot of buyers looking for $6K annual revenue, even at high margins.

I'm not that good at marketing either, but I'm having to figure it out. We programmer types think that "if you build it, they will come", and that a better mousetrap will trump any need for a sales and marketing strategy beyond a good checkout page. The truth is, if you don't figure out some of the marketing basics for yourself, at least enough to know what type of marketing experts to use, you'll be likely to have the same problems with your next venture. You might get lucky and stumble into a hot market, but if you don't, marketing will be the difference between being in the top tier making a double digit percentage of the available revenue in the market and being an also-ran making a pittance.

[gamebak]

Thank you, this really put me on thinking. The good part is that I always like to work hard and automate most of my products even if it takes me more time, and in this case it's ~97% automated. The problem with marketing is that I couldn't find my buyers when I tested, most of the success was with forums but at a low volume. So I assumed that I picked the wrong niche where to do business :)

[benologist]

What have or are you doing to grow that revenue?

If you've done your best and you can't get past that $500 barrier then move on. But getting from $500 to $5000 should be a shorter path than starting a new product from nothing.

[gamebak]

I tried different approaches but I'm not that good when it comes to marketing. From what I saw the proxy industry is pretty big with over 1 mil searches monthly, just that I don't know how to get to my customers. Recently I tried to get more exposure and it has a slowly growth, but yet I don't feel that I can get much out of it.

[thenomad]

FYI, I'm in the target market for your product and after reading the sales page, I'm not entirely sure what your product does.

So there may well be some potential improvements to be made there!

[anotheryou]

this :)

[gamebak]

Thank you guys for the great feedback, I never considered that my dirt looking design could be the source of my problems, plus the embarrassing typo errors.

[benologist]

I think you're making a mistake writing this off as an issue you can solve by working more on your website and perhaps most importantly using only your existing skills that you are comfortable with.

Your design and the improvements and optimizations don't mean anything until after you find a way to reach your market. If you can't reach your customers nothing else matters. You have some paying customers so apart from typos your website is good enough at least for now.

[mattm]

Web apps generally sell for about a year's worth of profits. So you'd probably get around $6000 if you sold it. Is that worth it to you?

If you are serious about selling, I'm currently looking at acquiring products in your profit range. Please email me if you'd like to discuss.

[michaelbuckbee]

I took a look at your site and you could probably double signups if you bought a $20 theme (or even just used default Bootstrap) and fixed the typos.

[gamebak]

Thank you, I prepared a new design for my newest product http://seo.skyul.com and I will implement that in the main domain as well and see how people are reacting to it.

[Igglyboo]

Seconded, the site honestly looks like it was made by someone who just took their first web design class. It instantly turned me off to the site when I first saw it.

[rolyatyasmar]

How much would you consider selling it for?