So I’m not sure if I would classify this as a great sale or really anything the seller should celebrate about. However, for the right buyer this could be a pretty nice deal. This is also a great example of the wide range of sites that sell on the Flippa marketplace. What I find interesting about this sale is the the creator built this as a lean startup, did real customer development, signed-up clients, but hasn’t been able to take it to the next level.
The perfect buyer for this site is someone that understands how to put a successful business model behind this idea. The development work and some pretty critical market research has already been completed. I’m seeing this more and more, businesses selling on Flippa that started-out as big ideas and still have the chance to be big, but not with the person who created them.
In this case, the owner of ClientLunchBox.com is pretty smart guy who has been on Mixergy.com before and definitely knows his stuff. He is throwing in three months of consulting from him to flesh-out your business model and turn the app into everything that it can be. For someone with good sales/marketing experience this could be a great opportunity. Just think, they could easily spend over $3,000 getting this developed, what they are buying here is ready to go.
The auction ended with 32 bids from 22 bidders and started at $100 one month ago. I think most people would look at this auction and think that the seller loses because he put his time and money into building it and sold for peanuts. However, it’s important to remember that most entrepreneurs fail, a lot. When they fail they learn valuable lessons but rarely make money through the failure. In this auction the seller tried something, learned more about the market, failed, and now make a few thousand bucks from the failure.
When I see sales like these I think of all my friends with a solid sales/marketing background that are too scared to hop into software game because development is too mysterious to them. It’s a bit like me when I go to the mechanic. Not only do I not know what the parts are called, I have no idea how much they cost. Most pure business people don’t know the differences between Ruby on Rails and PHP, or the best way to embed videos on a website. This is fine, but it means hiring people and potentially getting overcharged or not ending-up with what you were looking for.
For someone with a sales/marketing background looking to start a service like ClientLunchBox.com, this could be a perfect fit. They don’t have to estimate the costs to create the entire platform, the work has been done. The product is there, now the question is, does the buyer have a model for turning that product into a real business?
