Ask HN: I'm 17 and trying to sell my first business - critique + advice?

[MikeHo]

Below is copy and pasted from my local business craigslist ad and from flippa.com --

What am I missing? Is my valuation way off?

Are there any aspects of the sale I should be careful or weary of?

I've never sold a business before and the closest I've come to consulting/selling a business was a couple years ago when I gave a $2,000 course on craigslist to teach people how to make a fair financial earning through conducting and reselling of virtual goods based on just personal selling on forums.

"AccountsDen

Bidding Starts at $5,000

Website Statistics and Collected Data Site Visibility Google PageRank 0 Alexa Rank 273,992 Links in Google 13 Links in Yahoo! 3,785 Domain Registration Date 2nd Feb, 2010 Compete Stats Compete Ranking 0 Trust Neutral SEMRush Stats SEMRush Rank 4,417,088 Keywords in Google 14

Description

"AccountsDen.com is a company which offers services related to World of Warcraft accounts. We have supplied hundreds upon thousands of satisfied customers with secure, premium World of Warcraft accounts. All of our accounts for sale are either purchased from Original Owners who have went through our extensive verification process in order to sell their account, or is a Pre-Made account hand leveled by us.

Our prices are set accordingly to accommodate the average Joe. We here at AccountsDen understand not everyone can shell out half a paycheck on a World of Warcraft account, and in order to serve our customers better, we are the ONLY World of Warcraft account sales website to offer a Payment Plan. Please refer to our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) for more information on this service.

AccountsDen.com is located in Canada. We are amongst the select few World of Warcraft sales websites which offer Phone Support -- 1-778-709-0285."

As our home page states, we are an ecommerce site solution focusing on World of Warcraft (American opposed to Europe, however all infrastructure is in place to accommodate WoW EU as well) -- however, growth potential is not limited to just WoW and can expand in to any MMORPG as well as captivate on CD Key sales.

Simply put -- veteran players who come across our site, can create an account in a matter of seconds and click on "Sell Account" which they fill out a brief form. The form translates to an efficient page on our back-end where we can directly pull information from wowarmory.com to see what the character is equipped with and offer the seller a quote based on their account. Once an account is purchased, the account is moved to our inventory section and is listed under "Buy Accounts".

What is included?

- Domain

- All site content and rights

- Current / Existing Inventory

- 2 Day training anywhere in North America (We'll come to you)

- Ongoing support / training for 365 days

- Consulting available after that

Monetization can be furthered with --

Ad Sales for a related product such as Virtual Game Currency (WoW Gold)

Affiliate services

Other MMMORPG

World of Warcraft: EU

CD KEY Sales (In which we have a 15-20% margin)

+ more! Revenue Details

Revenues have varied due to the ongoing process since launch of SEO.

Revenues of equivalent caliber of site have potential for $10,000 - $40,000 / month gross based on sole adwords traffic generation -- figures are of existing competitors.

With word of mouth / forum advertising, site was averaging $3000 - $4000 which has not been consistent lately as we have halted SEO/Advertising/Pursuit of this site. (Have PayPal records going in and out dating prior to 2009 when this was just a sole forum based operation)

Margins are still existent on products, and majority of all related products are marked up 100% of cost. Traffic Details

During our peak of SEO where we were on the first page of Google for the majority of our targeted keywords such as "Buy wow accounts" and "sell wow accounts" we were averaging roughly 150-200 unique visitors per day.

Our traffic is considered to be very condensed and specific as those who visit a site such as ours has a purpose of either selling or buying a world of warcraft related product.

During our peak SEO period, we had a page rank of 195,000~.

SEO has halted, however, can commence with the right interested buyer."

[lachyg]

You might be better off letting potential buyers know more about how the buying / selling process works.

I would narrow the support down to 3 months max.

What're the current earnings, etc?

[MikeHo]

The buying / selling process is fairly complex and I have training material prepared from start to finish provided in mind that the person has zero previous knowledge of the topic. -- included in the 2 day training

For the nature of the business I'd think a longer support is crucial though as many new obstacles and situations arise that cannot be predetermined. -- hopefully this will not come back in the long run to burn me for offering such long support.

I've moved on to other projects and haven't had time to deal with AdWords and was short staffed so I halted SEO -- on average with minimal input time it generates about $3-4k a month.

If you do a simple google search "Buy WoW Account" all sites on the right hand side - sponsored ads are earning bare min. $10,000 / month net.

No matter how good an account is -- Level 85 accounts we purchase between $60 - 250. $60 account usually sells for $199.99 and a $250 account would sell for $500-600 -- this is the general case with all websites.

With SEO having us on the first page of "Sell WoW Account" keywords at rank 4 from the top -- we were receiving roughly 50-100 "Sell Account Requests" -- at the time we were only picking the best deals.

Monitor a site like "www.vbarrack.com" -- a full company which employs more quite a few employees. There turnover is roughly 40-50 accounts a day with an inventory of a quarter million - half a million dollars in just World of Warcraft accounts alone.