Tell HN: I put my startup up for sale. Enterprise-grade social media management
flippa.comWe've been working on Socialblaze for over a year. We strongly believe in the product and have users who would attest to how critical/useful it has been for them. We have a very strong roadmap that clearly differentiates us and solves problems that nobody in our space is solving. However, simply, we ran out of money and weren't able to secure the funding we needed.
We have some of the top brands and agencies using it. However, we need more users and don't have the necessary budget to do proper marketing and continue to develop on our roadmap. We want to give the product to someone who can take it and has the resources it needs.
Clickable link to product: http://www.socialblazeapp.com
Hi. I'm from Flippa. I've noticed you've listing the site as being a start-up site rather than established. Without debating the definitions of these, you may get more interest as an established site as you've been live for a number of months now. Let me know if you'd like us to change this for you.
We've also added $80 worth of credits to your account so that you can feature your listing during the private sale for more eyeballs.
Finally, we publish a weekly newsletter called the A-List that reviews premium listings in detail (see https://flippa.com/a-list). We'll look at nominating your listing for inclusion to ensure it gets visibility from our more premium buyers.
Tell us what your website is and what it does.
I'm sure that this information is in the linked article, but so that this isn't just an advertisement for your sale, tell us about it. How'd you market it, why did it "fail"? What made you decide to sell? How'd you settle on a price? What do you plan on doing after this? Are there employees that come with this? What's it written in etc. etc. etc.
I'm one of the Co-founders of Socialblaze - here's my response to your questions:
Socialblaze is a social media management application that helps companies measure and optimize their return on investment from social media marketing. It has a lot of advanced social media analytics that most other social media management tools don't have; but that agencies and brands need to measure their social media marketing efforts.
We haven't done a whole lot to market it besides for some SEO efforts, blogging, Facebook + Twitter. There's a lot more we could have done in terms of SEO; but we ran out of funds to continue working on it full time.
We want to sell Socialblaze because we want to pass it along to a company who can work on this full time and who can achieve the vision we have for Socialblaze.
After this, we don't have specific plans. We'd be interested in possibly coming along to continue developing the product. Whatever we do, we want to continue developing products since that is what we're really good at.
I just left a comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2486586
In terms of the price; the $20,000 is just the minimum offer. It will take at least $500,000 in development effort to re-create the software we've built; so there's a lot of value in the technology.
Is that a "no"? The comment you're linking me doesn't say much other than:
"We tried this, now we're selling it."
A "no" to what question?
A detailed blog post will be coming soon with why we're selling, what we did, etc.., if that's what you're looking for. Some of this info is in comments or on the listing.
>A "no" to what question?
How'd you market it?
Why did it "fail"?
What made you decide to sell?
How'd you settle on a price?
What do you plan on doing after this?
Are there employees that come with this?
What's it written in?
I was asking you these questions because as it was (and is) there's not any information here, you're just posting a link to an ad. This would be like me posting a link to craigslist, and if anybody asked me about it, responding that they should just read the craigslist post. I figured if you could give us some actual information, it would have gotten you more points, and more eyeballs on your link.
Can you share some usage stats. For e.g. number of users etc? also some technical details on how the platform was built would be helpful. Thanks.
What I posted on the Flippa site:
To make showing the stats easiest, I'll focus on the past 90 days: From Jan 25 to Aprl 24, we've had 1916 unique visits. The average time per visit is 4 mins. From those visits; we've had 319 signups to our product. That's a 16% conversion rate.
We also ran some SEM campaigns, Facebook + LinkedIn ads. We had a 13% conversion rate from Facebook ads. And a 5-40% conversion rate on LinkedIn depending on the ad. With the right marketing budget, you should be able to drive a lot of signups and usage to the product.
Our actual application (app.socialblazeapp.com) has had 737 visits in the past 90 days. Average time spend inside our application, per visit is 11 minutes.
The tech is all Microsoft based. The application is ASP.Net MVC 2.0 C# using SQL Azure. We are hosted on Windows Azure although you can easily move the application to dedicated windows servers and to use MS SQL.
I used the website a couple times, and love it. I wish I had the money to purchase it myself.
why do you have the listing for 3 months? is there a buy it now or do bidders have to wait?
It's not an auction on Flippa. It's a private sale; meaning people make offers and we accept the one we like. We did this because we want to make sure the product goes to someone who will do something with it.
We don't want to wait the 3 months. We would prefer to sell as soon as possible so that the product doesn't fall behind in terms of the roadmap / competitors.