Selling dead startups in byte-sized chunks

Entrepreneurs that never fail are rare unicorns. Most of us need a few trips to the school of hard knocks and a salt and peppering of good fortune to succeed.

So, what happens to all the failed projects we leave behind? The ones sitting gathering dust in private GitHub repositories. Is there any value left behind? Could there be interested buyers who want to acquire the project to bootstrap their own? Our community seems to think yes.

A number of companies have set out to address this market need (ThriftMVP, microns.io, and NanoAcquire). The pitch: pre/early-revenue MVP marketplaces.

However, could it be that selling a dead startup as a complete package limits the number of interested buyers? What if one buyer wants a white-label of your frontend, whilst another wants your ETL backend service, and another just a consultation? Does the project even need to be "dead" for you to make a sale?

Rather than assume a buyer is looking for an MVP and that the seller wants to sell everything, I wonder whether a more nuanced environment might be a more efficient marketplace. A 'garage-sale' of sorts.

So with that in mind I spun up deadstartups.co. It's a simple site designed to explicitly display the value embedded in dead/stalled/active projects. That way, prospective buyers can decide what facets of a project they are interested in and can contact the founder if they'd like.

So community, what do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. As much as I love the idea of zombie and graveyard branding, the project name is a placeholder and subject to change. In fact, the whole thing is just an experiment that might not make it beyond this post. Your comments will largely dictate its future. Cheers.

Edit (29/01/23): I dropped the idea because of lack of traction and took the domain down.