Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Translated to truth from euphemism.
We started a company to try to get rich off the back of other websites. After investing all of our personal money we have realized that we will never get it back and we're tired of working 80+ hours a week for nothing and we know we will never make a dime.
We're looking for a sucker to do all the work to try to sell our craptastic software "company" that has never sold a single line of code and attempt to get some of our money back.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd like him to consider dying.
Well, not really dying, but just giving up.
I HATE all these status updates for farmville or mobwars or whatever stupid game people are playing on these social media sites. Everyone has jumped on the social media band wagon, and lately, it's having these craptacular games.
I don't care about a body in a trunk of a car, or a lonely pink cow, or lost ugly duckling. Stopping these dumb games from showing these retarded updates and wasting the time of people!
Die social media games, dieeeeeeee!!!
If you have to turn to "Ask Slashdot" for what's likely THE most important decision your business could make (sale), then you really have no business farming this out to someone you've just met.
Believe it or not, Slashdot is a rather poor place for high-level business strategy (I know! I thought slashdot knew everything!). I don't know much about selling a company, but I do know a little about risk. If you really don't have the skills internally to do this yourself, there's an ENORMOUS risk of looking outside the company to find someone with these skills. If you don't have the skills to do this yourself, how are you going to know who's qualified to make such a big decision? How are you going to know if they're doing a good job? Put into simple terms, what's your expected gain in value from selling the company vs. selling your product? Now think about that in terms of hiring the wrong sales guy.
The thing is, you can always sell the company later. If you've demonstrated a viable sales strategy, your company is going to be that much more easy to sell, and worth more money.
AccountKiller
Its out in public now at http://www.appainter.com/
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
We've had severial successful games on the framework, so it is proven:
http://apps.facebook.com/thesummoning/
http://apps.facebook.com/hammerfall/
http://apps.facebook.com/bandbattle/
Total our games have about 6 million users.
How much revenue do they generate?
AH!
Except the article was not much of an advertisement. It didn't even link to a website. Not that I blame the original poster for keeping this information close to his chest. After all, contact information, in this particular case, could be invaluable.
Apparently a random group of hackers has created a "framework" for making social games. They don't have any games that demonstrate the power of this framework, but it is an awesome framework nonetheless. After several man-years of work on this framework the hackers have decided that the best way to capitalize on their work is to sell their software to someone in the social gaming community that doesn't have a competing framework already. Since they don't know anyone in the social gaming community, much less someone in the social gaming community that is in need of an untested but still awesome game framework, they want to find a third party willing to sell their software on commission.
Yeah, I would want my name on that advertisement.
1) you can block the updates from showing.
2) they're YOUR friends, motherfucker. stop associating with idiots?
2) they're YOUR friends, motherfucker. stop associating with idiots?
Call me a cynic, but that would leave little people to associate with.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
It seems that others might be interested in any revenue that is generated
http://mercuralis.deviantart.com/journal/23000665/
And another thing. You are trying to enter a field where MOST of your competitors are CROOKS. Do you really want to be associated with such a label as a "Social Network Game Producer" when those that already are seem to be jumping ship in an attempt salvage what little reputation they retain now the cat is out of the bag regarding the less then savory business practices they've used?
If this link is to be believed, it seems they will be quite at home associating with crooks.