How I sold a stale project for $5,000

Clear Check is a project that was born out of development work I did as a freelance software developer. I built it into a small but profitable Micro SaaS back in 2015. But other ideas soon became my daily focus, and Clear Check was languishing. So after much debate, I sold it for around $5,000 in 2021.

Born from a client's idea

I have been building web applications for close to 25 years, mostly as a consultant and freelancer. Back in 2015, a customer came to me with an idea. They had a child who was a member of a local youth football team. Due to new state laws, the team was suddenly required to collect a lot of paperwork from each volunteer adult who worked with kids. The law was meant to protect kids from abuse, but it put a huge burden on small, non-profit organizations. Each team was required to collect the photo ID and several background checks from every adult and keep detailed records.

My client was looking for a way to manage all this paperwork and came to me with the idea to build a solution for this paperwork management problem that could scale beyond their small organization. He felt that many other teams would need this product and, since their budget was tiny, asked if I would be willing to build it at a reduced rate in exchange for the ability to sell it to other teams.

Usually, I would not entertain these arrangements. But this project had one advantage: I thought it could be built pretty quickly and at low risk to myself.

Building and marketing

As a tiny non-profit organization, the football team had a minimal budget. After discussing the requirements, we allocated just 25 hours of work to the project. This was a tiny project for me at the time, something I ordinarily would not take on but I was intrigued by the idea of building the solution into a multi-tenant SaaS app.

I agreed to build it for that 25-hour cost and at a reduced hourly rate. I was pretty confident I could get something basic out the door in that amount of time. I spent that 25 hours and was paid for the work, but making the product more "market-ready" probably took another 50 hours, which I did on my own time.

After launching the service, my client and I attempted to sell it to other local teams simply by the word of mouth. Fortunately, many parents have children in multiple organizations. They would see one organization using Clear Check and then recommend it to other organizations they were involved it. This word-of-mouth effort helped us attract a few customers.

Over time, I spent at least another 50 hours adding more features and making the service more useful to those other customers. We raised the prices the few times and ended up with a handful of paying customers, each of whom was paying between $500 and $700 per year for the service.

To sell or shut down?

Annual revenue grew to about $2,500 per year. But I had no idea how to market the product. Several years passed, the same original customers were still using the product. There was no growth, and I had no time to dedicate to marketing. I had ideas about making it more useful to other markets, such as other groups besides sports teams but no time to do so.

By this point, I had taken on a business partner. The two of us worked together on other products, one of which, StatusGator, was actually gaining traction. We constantly debated whether we should just shut down Clear Check, sell it, or invest more in it.

After much debate, we decided to try and sell it, not for the money but to make sure the existing customers could still use the product. We posted the project on Flippa and on SideProjectors. I was very skeptical of Flippa because it's filled with a lot of low-end products and boiler plate.

We listed Clear Check at around 2x the annual revenue. We felt this was the low end of the range most SaaS products sell for, and hoped for a quick sale.

A successful sale

Someone saw our listing on SideProjectors and reached out to us. We had several calls about the product wherein he asked about the technology, and we talked about ideas for growth.

Eventually, the buyer decided to meet our asking price, around $5,000. We agreed to accept half of that up front and the other half when all the existing customers rolled over and renewed. This was only a few months away, but it meant that he would only be paying about $2,500 for the product. The rest would come from the money the existing customers paid to us. We accepted the deal with a straightforward one-page contract and facilitated the transfer of assets and code.

Lessons learned

All in all, we are very happy with the process and the outcome. The process of selling was smooth and having an established client base, even though it was small, made the product attractive to prospective buyers.

We are thrilled that we did not need to shut down the project. The money we earned was pumped right back into StatusGator, which is approaching $20,000 MRR and now takes up the majority of our time. Not having the distraction of another project or its support or maintenance requirements has allowed us to achieve more focus.