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Ask HN: A better way to spend $633k in advertising for your startup

2 points by pcunite ↗ HN
Special thanks to the HN community for allowing this type of discussion.

I want to discuss, "Is buying a business and using it as an ad vehicle a better option over traditional forms of advertising?" I present to you my business as a means of accomplishing this for you. Utilize my established brand's customer base to get better ROI over banner and search engine ads.

So, I have a decade old brand that includes a website and C++ based desktop products for the Microsoft Windows environment. Customers include recognizable brands (Airbus, John Deere, etc.), government agencies, universities, small law offices, small businesses, and soccer moms.

Business and non-commercial entities buy my products to slightly augment the Windows desktop experience.

You will get full control of the domain, the source code, and all customer contacts. You get everything. The brand runs itself with me intervening for custom programming and pre-sales help with larger orders.

Don't buy it for the yearly revenue which is low and uninteresting. You want this for the SEO, customer base, and product downloads. Utilize the domain or products to push your message.

Why? It look a long time, but I finally realized I am actually a Product Manager and not any of the other things it takes to run a business. You are a person that knows how to run a business. My skillset is understanding the product experience and placement, client services, etc. Take what I've done and use it to better itself or your brand's message.

Contacting me: My throw away email account is in my profile. After you contact me, I'll communicate with you over a business account. Respectfully, I ask you to not contact me unless you have the resources for something like this. I know this post raises curiosity, but you'll be wasting time for both of us if you're not truly a buyer.

Thank you for your interest. I'd be happy to discuss, in the comment section, the general idea being presented here (but not any specifics about the company being offered).

8 comments

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gk1
This is a sales pitch, not a question. Doesn't belong in Ask HN.
pcunite
It is a real discussion I want to have with the HN community. What do you suggest?
mtmail
Make it a proper sales pitch and submit it without "Ask HN" in the title.
gk1
You can ask about cases where companies use a smaller product or company (by building in-house or through acquisition) as an acquisition channel for the main product. Now that could be an interesting discussion with many examples.

Maybe you can add an aside to that discussion mentioning your offer. What you did here is write a sales pitch with the broader question as an aside.

pcunite
This is actually something I did with one of my products. I was not sure how valuable it would be, so I made a smaller product, gave it away with the intention of it driving sales to my main offering. As it turned out, this loss leader was able to stand on it's own and generate revenue.

That is why I'm thinking my whole business could be useful to someone with the right skills. I don't have the knack for this sort of thing.

sharemywin
Do you have any examples out side products or services you've successfully sold through your business customers?

If you have a third party product you profited 100-200k I could see this a s a good buy for the right person.

Seems if I paid a few bucks on something 10 years ago and got an email pitching some else I would consider it spam. Assuming something like 1-2 cents per spam address you would need like 63M customers to justify your company valuation.

pcunite
Good comment. Some of my customers spend $10K or more. So, they might be worth more than $1, but I get what you're saying.