6
6 Comments

How do you recommend transferring assets after selling your side project?

Hey everyone, I was curious what the recommended approach was to transfer assets / money after a deal was made for selling a side project (not too much money involved).

I was thinking something along the lines of receiving half up-front, transferring the assets (minus the domain / DB), receiving the last half, and then transferring the last remaining assets.

Does this approach make sense? Would love to hear thoughts from people who have sold / bought in the past!

  1. 2

    Hey Ryan. An easy and fairly standard approach would be to use escrow.com. This keeps both buyer and seller safe.

    It's basically %-based but with some minimums and caps (I think). You can get a what-if estimate right on the home page (for example, $400 would be a $13 fee).

    1. 1

      Hi Ryan, I would totally agree with JPaul on this. I wrote a small write-up here, which you might find useful: https://dealsflow.com/using-an-escrow-service/

      Let me know if you have any kind of feedback!

    2. 1

      Awesome, thanks so much for the info! I'll look into it.

  2. 1

    We sold our core technology behind an early version of Wavve back in 2017. The sale price wasn't a life changing amount of money (low 5-figures), but it was enough to extend our runway so I drafted a legally binding agreement governing the details of the sale. I'd recommend a quick meeting with your attorney or accountant to make sure you're prepared for the tax implications. The sale agreement and transfer process really depends on the purchase price and your risk tolerance.

    Here's what I did:

    We required half of payment upfront and the other half upon migrating all the technology to new accounts. It's easiest to just transfer account ownership, but if you've got other tech that isn't part of the sale, you'll probably have to manually move things as you go.

    Process:

    1. Created new dedicated accounts for each piece of technology in the sale: AWS, MLab, and a few others.

    2. Manually moved the infrastructure by setting up each account.

    3. Once everything was moved, we did a final call where I walked the buyer through each account.

    4. At the conclusion of the call, I sent the buyer account credentials and recommended they change all passwords.

    5. I received the final payment shortly thereafter.

    1. 1

      This is super helpful and exactly what I was looking for, thank you! Out of curiosity, did you use a service like Escrow.com for the actual transfer of money or was that handled privately?

      1. 2

        I just handled it privately.

        Didn't want to deal with the transaction fee and felt okay with the level of risk based on our legal agreement and having half payment up front.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 16 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments