To buy or not to buy...that was the question

It was quite an easy decision to enter the world of Mac product development through acquisition rather than slogging my guts out for 12 months in all my spare time and evenings.Don’t get me wrong I love coding and regularly find myself hacking away in the wee small hours of the morning. Its just bringing a product to market is a long road from which I know many fall along the wayside when trying to travel it in spare time. So being an impatient sort looking to purchase an application just seemed a good approach to take. So how has it gone.

It was around mid April I put the following posting on the macSB mailing list as well as making an appeal on my Late Night Cocoa podcast.

As someone who understands how demanding bringing a release 1.0 product to market is I have decided to give myself a jump start by looking to purchase the source code and rights to an existing (or almost existing) OS X product.

Maybe you’re a desperate shareware developer looking to get away from a particular product or you have that second product your unable to maintain now your first is so successful or there's that product you have almost finished thats just sitting on the back burner and you never seem to quite get round to.

I’m happy to pay hard cash for it or negotiate a revenue based deal or a combination of the two. (I'll consider any other basis as well if you want to explain it to me).

Send me a private email on xxxxxxx detailing the terms of your offer (not legally binding), and I will let you know if I’m interested. If the products not yet finished or released please be realistic about its current position. Please make sure you describe the architecture of the product i.e Cocoa , Carbon , ObjC, Java etc.

Over the next few weeks I received a total of 12 proposals that broke down in the following form

2 Ideas for Software not yet developed (actually pretty good ideas)
3 Products that used to be available had fallen by the wayside due to lack of love
4 Shipping products (although one had only been shipping a few days)
3 Products in late Beta.

The prices being asked ranged from $0 with revenue split through to $50,000

Once some of these offers were in I realised I was pretty unprepared to make a decision and had set myself no hard criteria by which to start judging different applications. Actually I never did come up with a hard and fast list but sort of some principles I set myself as I went through. I’m not saying these are great principles just the ones I chose for myself.

  1. I dismissed product ideas as this defeated the whole point of the exercise.
  2. I didnt want any long term substanial debt. Although some of the owners of the more expensive offers were willing to receive a large portion of the sale value in the form of various revenue sharing schemes I decided I wanted to be free from any such ties in order to be able to just do my own thing. This discounted a number of applications based on available funds.
  3. Despite what I said in my original request I in the end decided that I would only look at Objective-C / Cocoa applications. This meant a few more fell by the wayside.
  4. I decided I would not purchase any application that required me to have any industry specialist knowledge beyond what I already had. As great as some of these applications were they would require me to get to know lots of things about various industries or markets and although sometimes this thought was quite attractive common sense told me it would be a lot of hard work. This helped 2 more out of the door.
  5. I had to actually be interested in what the application did. Obvious really, if your going to spend months of your life working on something it should at least interest you. This got rid of another.
  6. I had to like whom I was buying off. This didn’t turn out to be a problem as everyone was really nice, but it was the fact that everyone was nice that made me realize that if they weren’t then I probably wouldn’t buy from them.
  7. I had to believe the product had a future. Not based on any market research but just my own instinct. This saw another disappear.

So I ended up with two and bought them both.

Event Maker was a little tricky, its future is a little uncertain until the complete leopard feature set is revealed, but it did a few things I was interestedin and its price reflected its uncertainty and the fact its still a beta product so it seemed a good move.

Tracktime is just the sort of application I love, it’s a pretty utility with loads of potential, it had just been released so its author considered it at 1.0 but only having been out a short time there is no real history to deal with.

So what have been the good points so far.

  1. In just over a month I have found a sellable application that I believe I can be passionate about, purchased it , made the necessary changes needed to sell it under my own branding and got it out and for sale.

  2. I have a decent utility that should be released within a few weeks and have some interesting code that could be very useful.
  3. I have a great platform on which to build and lots of ideas for future release.
  4. I now feel that with an application out there and soon a second actually quite keen to produce some of my other application ideas from scratch. I guess a mental barrier has been overcome that with two products out its ok to spend a year on a new one. (While not neglecting these two of course)
  5. The price I paid for the two application is definitely less than the loss of income I would have suffered in taking time out from my consulting work to develop them.

The bad points.

  1. I have to immediately support applications that I am still getting to grips with. This makes every support request an interesting experience as it can sometimes be in an area of the application that is still fairly unknown to me.

  2. I have never experienced that moment of satisfaction when the first person purchases the first copy of an application you have spent many hours slogging away at to get out the door.
  3. I’m poorer than I was a month ago.

    So has it all been worthwhile, watch this space...