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by codegeek 2673 days ago
First, I commend you for doing something that you really enjoyed. That is great and must have taken a lot of sweat and hard work.

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.

3 comments

I disagree with the zero valuation. If you have an investment property for sale, that has no tenant, is it worth zero?
Personally, I have a similar project and I think I'm going to go the Patreon route, maybe merch. My followers/users aren't mega wealthy or enterprise users, and I work on my project for the community and the love of it. I never want to make them the product. This route won't make me mega rich or famous, but it will live and maybe even give me breathing room to prioritize it along with my professional work.
The valuation would not necessarily be determined by revenue only. Website traffic, page authority on Google, subscribers or users in general can be valuable to potential buyers.
These have very little value until you've proven that this traffic, subscribers, and users won't go away the moment you try to monetize them.