When we sold Kiko on eBay, the site was at the minimum bid (50k) until the last morning, when it jumped to 75k. In the last 30 minutes it jumped to 256.1k. Don't worry if people don't start bidding immediately, but I suggest you go out and try to drum up some tech news about it (TC, ReadWriteWeb, etc). You'd be surprised how much getting the word out can add to the value of an auction of a one-of-a-kind item like this.
Combination of fatique and a sense of completion. We can walk away now and say it was a success or we can struggle for another 1.5 years trying to achieve another level of success. At this point we're ready to sell, we're doing it now because it's worth something and we've reached a scalable and solid idea. We've accomplished everything that we've wanted to for our first start-up.
seems like a cheap way for weebly to get some more users... depending on what the final sale price goes to... And they could pick off any interesting features or code they liked.
there are a couple ways you could value this. in terms of users, you could probably acquire users at $1 apiece, so 14,000 users = $14,000 + (new user value). not sure what their growth rate is since all we know is that they've acquired 14,000 in 18 months, but if we give them the benefit of the doubt and say they've grown by 2,000 users in the past month, we'll say we can acquire an extra 24,000 users in the next year assuming the buyer puts no effort into it, so that would be a value of about $38,000.
user acquisition doesn't seem to be the best way to value these guys, and there wouldn't be that much value for us, anyway, since we grow by 14,000 users about every 3 days.
however, since they're pulling in (a pretty astounding) $3.43/user/year (even the inactive ones), based on the $4k/month figure, they could bring in $130,286 this year. Multiply that number by 2 to be conservative, or 4 to be more ambitious, and you have a valuation anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000.
having said that, any potential buyer would need a lot more information before making that kind of decision, such as what their revenue growth looks like, what it would look like realistically projected into the future, etc.
Cool analysis. It is always incredibly hard to put a value on something. The value is really what someone is willing to pay for it. Obviously, it is in their interests to go for as high of valuation as possible.
If they are pulling 4K a month and lets say that is a peak month for them and their growth is slowing. Then they might only be pulling 48K a year. When I sold a site in the past I got 2 1/2 times yearly revenue for it. Which would only give 125K valuation.
It is kind of amazing how just looking at a couple different numbers we have valuation ranges from $38,000 - $500,000
Kiko wasn't valued on users or anything, but on development time costs. What it would take to implement the same solution in house, which is another interesting way to look at it. I would love to see a write up about how happy they are with that purchase now that have been using it awhile.
Either way it should be fun to follow and see how this works out for them...
