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Ask HN: Help me give away a site that's made $70k

4 points by coderholic ↗ HN
I own https://applaunch.us, a website that has made almost $70k since it was launched back in 2012. See https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/26079/30819099-85e0b22a-a1d2-11e7-9157-c5f18cb3c3a7.png for a revenue screenshot from the stripe dashboard.

I've not touched the site for over 2 years, with most of my time going into https://ipinfo.io, and as a result the site is now just about breaking even with hosting costs. I've thought about shutting the site down, but recently had the idea of giving it away to someone with the time and passion to put some energy into improving and promoting the site. If nothing else, it could be a great learning experience for someone to get to work on an established site.

I'm looking for advice on how to best give it away. Where can I find people that might want to take it on, how should I decide who to give it to if there's a lot of interest? How should I best structure it? I'm thinking of handing everything over, and offering to pay the hosting costs for the first year, the new owner keeps all revenue etc. Is there anything else I should consider?

5 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] thread
discordianfish
That's a great idea. I'd start by open sourcing everything and putting the offer to hand over access to domain and data in the project README.

BTW, I've just launched my first little SaaS. Seems like you have some more experience doing this. Maybe you have some feedback? https://latency.at/

coderholic
Hmm yeah opensourcing it could be a good idea, I'd not considered that.

Latency.at looks great. Saw you on the HN homepage today, congrats!

discordianfish
Yes open sourcing it would be great. If only as example / inspiration. There are tons and tons of open source tooling and articles on building sites and services but rarely full sites with all the 'glue' around the core service that is necessary to actually operate it.

Re/ latency.at: This was probably /newest not the front page. My blog articles didn't work well on HN. But at least when launched I got on the front page. Still really hard to acquire users.

sharemywin
Why not list it on flippa and sell it. Doubt it makes a lot of money for you but, by the time you deal with giving it away you'll at least get a little out of the time.
coderholic
I'd rather give it away to somebody with the energy to put into it, but perhaps not the money to buy it. Passing it forward :)