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Comment by gldev3 | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy seeing posts like these, good for you pal. Is it hard to maintain? Is this just side income?

Thank you! It doesn't take a lot of maintenance, mostly side income at this point. But I have put in a LOT of hours on it over the years. I will work on it in bursts, and take a few weeks and work on it 3-5 hours a day, and then not work on it at all for a while. I do need to keep the image library fresh, but that is pretty easy. To be honest, if I worked a bit more on it, I think it could do a lot better.

At $4k per month, you could sell it for quite a bit of money. Multiples on apps are pretty high right now.

Are there any marketplaces for apps. I have a few.

Yes, many options exist. The big one is Flippa which will take just about any project and allow you to list. There are others that are specific for large businesses (either have a listing price floor or a revenue floor) such as FE International and Empire Flippers. Another new one that is 0% commission is MicroAcquire. I follow the founder on Twitter and they seem to be doing quite a bit of volume.

I've personally sold projects on both Flippa and MicroAcquire and happy to chat about the pro's/con's of each.

That would be nice. I'll have to check to see if it feasible for me. Microacquire looks like an all or nothing deal.

Do you mean as in "the price is firm" type all or nothing? If so, buyers can negotiate on price.

It looks like it is a whole business acquisition so all of the business or nothing. My app business for ios has been around since 2009 so I'm less desiring to part with it. I can part with some apps that are basically feature complete, mature and stable income.

I believe I saw Andrew (founder, operator of MicroAcquire) tweet out that some deals are for partial equity of a company. It's really just a listing page and from there the buyer/sellers are free to do what they want. If you had apps that you want to offload, just list and see what type of buyers approach you. Since there are no listing fees it's no risk (other than your time).

The issue I had with Flippa when I listed a business there is that there are a TON of tire kickers. Flippa has a lot of users, but I'd say many aren't serious buyers. Flippa will prepopulate "inquiries" to sellers with some standard questions (ex. "How much time are you spending on the business each week?" etc). I learned to just ignore any message that contained only those prepopulated messages after a while. At first I spent time crafting responses to them only to be ghosted after that. If a potential buyer can't take the time to write their own opening message, they aren't serious.

Thanks for the advice. I could spin out the applications in to a new company if I needed to. I have around 40 or so that have been around since 2011.

If they are generating even the slightest bit of revenue, you'll likely find a buyer and will probably be surprised at the multiples people are paying.

Would it be a 2, 5 or 10 year multiple? None of my apps have subscriptions. They are all purchase for $.99 or $1.99 and supported for ... well, 10 years now. I've moved about 144K Units in all.

So everyone is free to set their price, but here is the top 5 listings when I filter to those with >$1000 ARR.

$1k ARR --> listed for $20K

$240 ARR --> listed for $8K

$892 ARR --> listed for $9K

$99 ARR --> listed for $6.5K

$500 ARR --> listed for $15K

Now obviously people can ask for whatever they want and negotiate down, but you can see that multiples are crazy. To put it in perspective, my little app I sold I had made $5 TOTAL, and sold it fo4 $1500 USD and I had people telling me they would pay more after I had sold it. I think there is just a glut of people that want to get into small side gigs/startups that don't have the skills to code one. They see this as a kick start and lots of people can cobble together a few thousand.

You could try listing them here. May or may not favorably influence the price, in the same way private forum sales can sometimes go more interestingly than eBay et al.

(Translation: I'm benignly curious what apps :P)

Thank you for all the info you shared in this thread, it is interesting.

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