TwtApps For Sale; $500K Gets You 11-App Suite | Hacker News Reader

TwtApps For Sale; $500K Gets You 11-App Suite

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9 pointsvijayr11 comments

values Twtapps at $500,000, based on his estimation of how much it would take for anyone to develop as many apps with as much traction

Sorry, but $500k is a joke, those apps are trivial.

If I had that kind of money to drop on such a thing I'd much rather spend $50k on copying the apps (doable by one developer in under 6 months) and the remainder on marketing or more apps.

Moreover, if he thinks his little toybox is worth half a million, then why on earth doesn't he just monetize it himself...

There you go again, inserting reason in an otherwise good discussion.

This reminds me of the domains section on ebay where you are offered these great online businesses, only they just can't wait to move on to the next greatest thing so you can have it now cheap.

It doesn't matter if $500k is a joke or even a real figure that they hope to achieve. By using $500k as an anchor, $100k doesn't seem like such a crazy prize yet.. it is for what's being offered. It's a common persuasion/sales technique. Make a reallllly crazy offer and then the merely "slightly crazy" offers can actually seem erroneously realistic. (No, this doesn't work for everything ;-))

You mean like this: http://is.gd/2SEvr ? (thanks jacquesm)

I'm not so sure about that strategy, and even $100k is a joke for a bunch of semi-polished twitter apps without any monetization perspective beyond shotgun advertising.

I could see this stuff going somewhere in the $10k ballpark - but still have no idea why anyone would want to buy that bag of mediocrity, except perhaps for eliminating a potential would-be competitor.

Most twitter apps are getting maybe a $1/rpm, and that's if you can sell the space. CPM rates are below .25/cpm for the stuff listed on BuySellAds.

I tried to make a run at Twitter advertising (http://thebranchnetwork.net/) and found that most advertisers have little interest in general twitter advertising. Most marketers are beginning to realize that the best way to use twitter is to participate in the conversation.

500k seems very high for this, 50k would be more reasonable. Unfortunately for software developers everywhere you can't put a value on development time since its just a sunk cost.

> "...most advertisers have little interest in general twitter advertising. Most marketers are beginning to realize that the best way to use twitter is to participate in the conversation."

Anecdotal eveidence bears this out for me, too, which I think is awesome. We don't need more advertisements; we need more authenticity.

I hope he gets a sale, but 500k seems a little too much. He hasn't monetized his apps, and there doesn't seem to be a clear cut way to monetize such apps.

Two comparables to consider:

I know this is a tech. startup, but for 500k I could theoretically buy a brick and mortar business that makes me 50-100k per year. Given the risk of monetizing twtApps, I would probably opt to do that.

Also, SGN was buying up small fb app companies for 1-1.5MM about 1.5 years ago. Each was seeing 200-500k in revenues. And probably most of that was profit.

Using this comparable, to justify the 500k valuation, twtApps would need to be seeing 66 - 166k in revenues.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802865

Yeah, I was half tempted to say "Dupe", but since I posted the original, felt like it would be a toolish thing to do.

Twollow also put itself for sale this week on Sitepoint, but then quickly took itself off the market. Twollow was claiming 8k of monthly revenue and was asking much less than TwtApps.

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