This being said, you can't shut it down. Simple as that. At $1MARR there are either hundreds of clients who depend on you, or a few big clients who depend on you. You can't let them down.
Look at your competition. Call their CEOs or COOs and either 1) either someone on top and give them 20% to 50% of your company or 2)sell it to them.
Thanks for the feedback, your points are all valid.
"based on not having a strong understanding of the market/ unit economics from the get-go"
Dude, not strong understanding of market etc and other reasons given are not correlated to not having a person on the inside after 6 years who can run it...it probably means staff havn't been involved enough...
I guess that's part of a problem of bootstrapping, everything has to be pyramid structure even with only 6 employees? Never thought about that.
Founders have a large amount of surface area to cover (office, accounting, insurance, payroll, legal, taxes, hiring, management, etc). If you are in a market that doesn't allow you to grow quickly enough to hire in a large enough team to cover these functions (plus the meat and potatoes of the actual product and customer requirements), you can be left stretched extremely thin. If founders are covering 15 different company functions, it hard to find someone who can handily take over.
Assuming the business won't simply shut down without the founders being full throttle on these sorts of tasks, it'll free up time for M&A.
Curious, why the urge to sell?
A lot of the feedback I've gotten from founders has broken down in the following sense: if the person has grown and sold a company before of >= 10M ARR, they typically say shut it down ASAP and move on. If the founder has never grown and sold a business before, they advise to keep it running.