HN Explorer

Ask HN: Where to market/sell partially developed software?

1 points by ermterm ↗ HN
Does such a thing exist?

I have a partially developed online betting platform. It's reached a scale which I can no longer develop as a side project, and I'm interested in selling. Other than reaching out to existing online betting platforms, does anyone have recommendations on how to market partially developed software?

6 comments

[ 8.6 ms ] story [ 26.8 ms ] thread
AznHisoka
To be realistic, the chances of selling something like this practically nil. Nobody wants to own software that they have no clue how it works, with the owner gone. That's a bad investment.
ermterm
Well, I would expect that as part of the deal, I (the developer) would be kept on to help get their team up to speed. That would be worked into the sell cost, of course.

But I get your point. I'm not even sure if this is feasible either, I just don't want to see my project of 1.5 years go to waste!

AznHisoka
The problem is nobody is willing to invest the time/resources to do the due diligence and consider this deal, when the outcome will still a mess for them to maintain, and isn't a finished product (let alone have any customers).
michaelpinto
You need to understand that for another coder to finish your project that they'd have waste time to reverse engineer your code, and even then they may not be happy with the way you coded it.

Of course this doesn't even account for the time spent doing bug testing, and then maybe cleaning up your code. And this of course assumes that your spec for the project was able to provide say 80% of the features that someone else is looking for to use.

So yes if you're looking for a cash exit you just wasted 1.5 years of your life.

On the flip side you can look at this as a learning experience and maybe draw the following lessons:

- Start with a small side project, and once you figure out what that is make it smaller.

- Real artists ship.

- Don't reinvent the wheel and do something that's already out there.

ermterm
Fair point. However, as someone who has (professionally) jumped from many different projects, on completely different platforms, I can attest to the fact that it is often quicker to pick up a system, than to develop it from scratch. That would certainly be the case here.

Of course the code might not match their quality expectation, nor feature set, but the sell price would reflect that (I would assume).

Perhaps I'm trying too hard to argue for something, that just doesn't exist :)?

Oh, and I personally don't agree much with the "don't re-invent the wheel" adage. In software, re-inventing the wheel has made many people, many riches.

michaelpinto
I've been working with coders for over 20+ years and yes there are exceptions but on the whole they're a picky lot. And even if they want to re-use code they tend to want something finished that's been well documented and field tested.

Also the ones who re-invent the wheel and make money are the ones who have a design concept that is different, so just re-writng code for its own sake is a hobby. If you want examples from the field Bill Gates purchased what would become MS-DOS. Or another example might be Steve Jobs basing NeXT on an open version of Unix rather than re-writing an OS from scratch.

But I think the key missing thing is having a finished product. This isn't to say that you can't ship with bugs (think of any Bill gates release) or ship with missing features (think of the MVP model) but ya gotta ship.