To sell or not to sell, and for how much?

It’s a beautiful day.

You have picked your best idea from your vault of ideas. You’ve secured a domain, designed a prototype, built an amazing landing page, reached out to customers, and successfully validated your product via significant amount early signups. Hurray!

Then, for whatever reason, you consider selling it.

But, what do you sell, exactly?

Just an idea? An idea with a landing page? No. It now has what 99% of ideas lack: a form of validation.

You sell an opportunity. Which, depending on various factors, could be huge.

Your project’s value depends on those factors. For instance, were those those signups paid signups, did they show explicit intent to pay when you launch? What revenue can you expect your project to achieve in X time based on given factors? What is the market size? How hard it is to get a piece of this market? etc…

Hypothetically…

Let’s assume you managed to market it so well, 100 passionate customers have already paid. Would this change your perspective on your project’s value? Would you still be excited to sell it because you’ve only worked on this for some insignificant amount of time?

Side note: The pricing of your project should not rely on time and effort you contributed, but rather on factors like the expected growth and ROI of the project long term.

Originated as a reply to @yaroslawbagriy, converted into a dedicated post thanks to Seth’s (@sethking) recommendation.