Ask HN: How Can I Sell My Project?

Or hey, have you considered just adding an option somewhere to donate somehow, and seeing if something happens?

For what it's worth, your site looks great, I'm not affiliated at all but it's really worth a click: https://classicalmusiconly.com/

Start small, be the reluctant buyer. You will be better off invoicing for services, like coding or writing.

Now, you want to sell this thing. This is where the issues start. You have not monetized it at all so technically it is not a business (no real revenue). Your best bet is to find someone who can use this to compliment something similar that they already do at a bigger scale and they are willing to provide an "emotional" price for it. To be blunt, if you try to sell it someone who purely is looking at it from a business perspective, the valuation is almost zero.

So here is what I suggest:

1. Setup a Patreon account and ask for people to contribute

2. Setup Affiliate Links for your social website and have a way for users to pay and when they convert, your affiliate partners get paid a commission.

3. Sell merchandise or other "related" items on the website.

4. Ask members of the website to subscribe and pay for some "premium" content if possible.

5. Find other bigger classical music folks/companies who may show some interest but do Steps 1-4 first.

I am not private equity type guy but buying/selling businesses excites me and when I see sellers like you who have put in so much hard work but never did it as a business, it breaks my heart a bit because you won't get a good valuation just because it was your baby. All the best.

Selling the project immediately likely won't give you the greatest value for the effort you've put into it simply because there is a lack of evidence on whether you're able to sell anything to the audience.

However, there is still some value in the audience, credibility and web properties and you can approach classical music promotion companies, etc. to see if they would be interested in taking it over.

If you collect data and have an insight into user preferences, this could add additional value but as what some have said, you'll likely get more money if you show that you can also sell to this audience.

I've got a couple of suggestions.

1. If you are in a tight spot financially and need to sell the site due to some emergency, come clean about that to your users. Let them know that the site they love is in trouble. It may help give you a little infusion of cash that will allow you to keep the project going for a bit longer.

2. If selling is still in your playbook, you need to demonstrate your property's value. Right now your list is untapped and therefore I couldn't tell just how many of your users are buyers. You need to do that work for your buyer.

I see you have a Patreon, and that's a great start, but it's not necessarily compelling enough on its own. If I were you, I'd start with affiliate marketing.

Think about what your audience has in common. If they are classical music listeners, the odds are high that they either play an instrument themselves or want to learn how to play one.

For those who want to be a musician, the answer is obvious: become an affiliate for high quality music instruction courses online.

For those who already are musicians, you might have a better sense of their problems than I would. Maybe they're more interested in better equipment or instruments. Perhaps they are more focused on monetizing their music, in which case it would be a good idea to take a look at courses online that focus on the business side of music-making.

If you created the site I'm seeing online, perhaps another thing you could do is connect music instructors with music students by giving instructors the chance to sell their lessons on your platform in return for a percentage.

Another source of potential revenue could come from in the form of grants. Find a local university (perhaps your alma mater?) and see what the music department says. Other than teach and research, professors pretty write grants for a living. They may have some ideas for you.

If you are yourself a musician (and especially a music teacher) you may be able to create your own course and sell it online to your listeners. You could create a "beginner's guide to Classical Music" and teach people about it.

Classical Music also shares quite a lot in common with film scores; you could monetize by allowing your users to sell their music to film makers who need music.

I hope some of these suggestions help. Good luck!

I think I can help you; most of the suggestions here are ‘growth hacker’ themed: if you drop me a private line, I can probably provide some music industry perspective that is going to be worth more than just monetize and flip, and ideally protect the integrity of your work so far.

That means if you want to sell, you have to pitch the business model. Aside from the actual musicians, you probably have as some part of your user base, classical music supporters. And these people are where the potential money is made. This are two segments. One is the traditional arts supporter: Older (60-65+), white, Democrat, female, tons of disposable income. Your user base is unfortunately not likely to have much of this segment. The next segment you want to look for among your users are people who used to be musicians that have moved on to other, more stable and lucrative careers. That group is disproportionately male, in their mid-30s to mid-40s, left-leaning politically, has disposable income, and is generally pretty eager to spend because they used to be really broke and are typically interested in treating themselves to nice things.

That's going to be the bulk of your value proposition if the business model is going to be to monetize your users directly. So I'd try to figure out approximately the size of that demo in your user base. When I worked in the market research industry, I did a fair amount of pro bono work for several orchestras around the U.S. studying their audiences and trying to help them figure out pricing models. That was about 10 years ago, so my data is old. But given the nature of the beast, I doubt they've changed substantially since then.

All in all, I think you have a tough proposition for a potential buyer in the sort of traditional, "I have the eyeballs, now show me the money." kind of model. But I would encourage you to maybe consider some other options.

As I said before, there is an entire class of people--basically the older, white, liberal aristocracy--who support classical music and the arts almost out of a sense of class obligation. You (or a potential buyer who was motivated) could try to find an investor willing to fund this project at a very moderate rate of return as a sort-of "break-even + a little extra" investment that also promotes the arts. Your business model there would eschew advertising because it's not really going to give you much of anything as income anyway and just annoy your users. Instead, you'd need to find some value in premium features such that you could charge a subscription for them.

Along similar lines, this could be spun off into a non-profit with a mission to spread the beauty and joy of classical music through social technology. You (or again, buyer) might have a lot more success here, especially if there are existing connections with the donor community for classical music.

The last idea before I switch gears is that you might be able to sell directly to an Orchestra. It's true every orchestra around the world is struggling financially. But these kinds of projects are things that donors can get really excited about. Arts organizations everywhere are trying all kinds of different ways to improve audience engagement and mostly failing miserably for reasons I won'...