Ask HN: Approaching your competitors for selling product?

Hello HN:

We are bunch of hackers working on web product. We have been working on it for a while. We have excellent traction. We are growing at the rate of 10%. However, it is a lifestyle business and we have tons of student loans. We tried to approach investors for seed financing but didn't get much success as everyone wants "more revenues". We are finding it hard to generate significant revenues. And we are not working in hot areas like "SoLoMo". We are essentially doing "web plumbing" type of stuff. We tried applying to YC but were turned down. That leaves us at an interesting crossroads. While we would love to grow our business but we can't remain detached from the reality. We all have financial obligations in terms of student loans and that has significantly impacting our ability to remain optimistic. We are first time entrepreneurs right out of college and so far we have bootstrapped it.

One of our main competitors is working in similar areas. However, they have much larger product portfolio and all-star team of founders who had couple of exits previously. They have recently raised multi-million round from top investors.

We are thinking about approaching them to sell our product. So I have couple of questions:

1. How do we approach them? 2. If they become interested, what do you think will be the timeline to get it done? 3. Will we have some sort of locking period to work with them? 4. Is there anything else that we should worry?

Any feedback would be appreciated. We are all recent CS grads from Ivy league schools and are pretty good at shipping stuff.