Finding Someone To Manage Selling a Software Company?

rrrrw22 writes "My company has spent the last year developing a framework for creating games on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. While we had originally planned to release the product to the public and take a percentage of the revenue, we have realized that we can make more money by selling the application to a funded company entering the social gaming space. Our problem is we don't have many other contacts in the social gaming space and would like to find someone to manage selling the company for us (in exchange for a percentage of the sale.) Where can we go about finding someone with the skills and contacts to sell a product like this? What experiences have others had trying to sell a company that we can learn from?"

Comments

you want VCs and an exit strategy, basically

[Trepidity]

If you're a small self-funded company, this isn't really at the level of specialized firms or agents specializing in acquisitions. It sounds like you fit in to standard venture-capitalist funding, which is usually aimed at eventually being acquired anyway. Often the VC firm will handle trying to sell the firm to someone bigger, when they think they can do so. However, your guess that you can be bought for a nice sum right now may or may not be something the VCs you can find will agree with. You might have better odds if you have multiple scenarios, like what you could do with another 6-12 months of funding.

This is partly because VCs are already in the business of evaluating "is this company worth anything (now or potentially), and who is it worth something to?" Most larger companies are wary of just buying unknown small firms, because they have no real way of evaluating that--- it's more often a multi-tier thing where the un-funded firm gets funded by a VC initially, then a larger firm buys from the VC.

Re:Why not

[Aladrin]

I looked into writing a platform for Facebook games and decided that it was just too bloody easy to use something like the Zend framework with a little extra code on top and write a game that way. Writing an entire framework for Facebook games would be rather pointless, unless you marketed it to the 'wish they could program but can't' crowd, and then it would be really lame.
I notice they say MySpace and Twitter as well, and that would make the framework tougher and a little more useful... But still not enough that I'd bother.

So to answer your question, I suspect they have discovered that the amount of money available as a 'public' framework is nearly zero, and therefore selling it to another company would be a lot more profitable automatically.

I actually wrote most of a very simple MafiaWars-style FB game just to experiment with how hard it was. It took me about 20-30 hours, including the time to research how to integrate with FB and learn something about Zend Framework that I didn't know yet, like authentication another 10 hours would have seen a working game, but I decided I didn't want a boring game, so I'm designing an interesting one and will put my time towards that instead, not that I have the basics clear.