I have great news, I sold my 4th SaaS product!
Userdesk, it’s an AI Chatbot platform for businesses I launched in June 2023 with a pre-launch and a subscription-based model a few weeks later.
This is my 4th exit since 2021.
2021 — I sold Iterspace pre-revenues (quite unusual, but it happened)
2023 — I sold Hivoe and Inboxs, two Twitter-related SaaS
2024 — I sold Userdesk
Each time, the context and the reasons to sell were completely different, as well as the process. Let’s see the context and the lessons learned with each one (so you can learn from them too).
iterspace
I started working on Iterspace in 2019 with one of my former colleagues (designer). I built it on the side of my full-time job at that time, as a team lead / senior software engineer. We worked on it for a couple of years, more or less. During the COVID, I was working from home and the time I saved from commuting, was dedicated to it.
At the beginning of 2021, we launched on Product Hunt, we got 70 upvotes (not that much but we didn’t have any distribution channel at that time), but Giulio Michelon noticed it, he wanted to meet us (two Italians launching a cool SaaS? it’s quite unusual), and he connected us with the final buyer.
I have to say that we didn’t set clear goals since the beginning. I wanted to make a living out of my businesses, but for my co-founder that was not realistic.
So when the possibility of selling arrived, he was completely convinced of the decision.
That was my first exit ever, and the amount of money was astonishing for a product with no revenues, so I accepted the deal.
The product hand-off was quite painful, as I created all the cloud resources on AWS with my personal account, and it was not possible to migrate them to another account (weird). So they had to re-create the whole infrastructure with their AWS account, and it took some time.
From the next SaaS on, I learned to create accounts with dedicated email, so the hand-off takes as long as sending the credentials to the buyer. And that’s it.
Hivoe & Inboxs
Very quickly, I had to sell these two Twitter-related products, due to the crazy new Twitter API pricing (from 0 to $42k/month). Thankfully, I was able to sell them to HypeFury, because the alternative was to shut down both of them—not a great deal.
The journey has been amazing, because since 2021 I started being active on Twitter daily, and that’s how I discovered some pain points related to DM management. The products were growing quite well (up to $4k MRR). It was shocking to sell them, especially for an unexpected reason.
Lesson learned: platform risk is real. Next time, I want to diversify more or avoid platform risk much more.
Userdesk
There’s much more to say about the exit of Userdesk.
I started working on Userdesk after the crazy hype I’ve seen about AI Chatbots around February / March 2023. AI was even more hyped than now, and as a SaaS owner, the value provided was simply incredible.
The platform allows you to “train” an AI Chatbot using your website (and other sources) and embed a live AI chatbot on your website. Simple, yet so powerful for customer support.
I pre-launched it with a $69 lifetime deal, and I sold 20 licenses in 24 hours. That was a validation for me (but I was wrong). A month later, the product was live and public, but a very small percentage of the pre-sale users signed up and used it.
I was perplexed.
This is my explanation. At that time, I already had a good reputation on Twitter / X. This sometimes brings to impulsive purchase from people who follows and appreciates you. This is great, don’t get me wrong, but it leads to misleading validation results.
Also, the product was poorly positioned, it was not targeting a specific niche and I didn’t know exactly who I was targeting: SaaS products, IT agencies looking for AI Chatbot platforms to resell, coaching services, and many others very different from each other.
This is a problem. I didn’t know how to write the copy of my landing pages, which content to write for my blog, and so on.
At the same time, a large number of competitors were already present and arrived in the short future.
Plus, in the end, I didn’t feel a great founder product fit. I have built a community on Twitter/X of 20k followers, and almost nobody was in overlap with the target audience of Userdesk. This meant an extra effort for me to find new clients.
In December 2023 I launched my Next.js SaaS Boilerplate Shipped.club, and I loved working on it, and helping other developers and aspiring SaaS owners to achieve their goals. This fits much better with my expertise and values—it’s simply a better fit for me.
Lesson learned: founder product fit matters much more than I expected.
What did go well?
I loved working with AI tech, and I think it has huge potential, now and in the future. It’s not a bubble. And who knows, maybe in the future I will work on an AI product again.
I found my customers mainly from AI directories. A lot of AI enthusiasts use them to discover new products, and it also brought a good domain rate, with very few blog posts written.
One of the main differentiation factors of Userdesk over the competition had been the UI and UX. Many people told me it was the best they tried between similar products, and it made me proud of the skills I’ve built over time. I am a software engineer, not a designer, but I’ve built many SaaS products now and the effort on the UI and UX paid off.
MRR-wise, the journey had been quite slow, but still brought good results, $1.1k MRR it’s difficult to achieve in less than 12 months.
If you’re wondering what’s the big spike in September, it’s an enterprise customer ($500/month) who subscribed. The fact the subscription plans start at $19/month up, it’s another explanation for the “rapid” increase in MRR.
I know I could have grown it much more with more marketing effort: positioning, content, social—but I still think I did the right thing with selling it, and I’ll focus more on Shipped.club and other SaaS products soon.
What’s the legal process for selling?
I used the platform Acquired for the first time to list my product. I got around 20 people potentially interested, and a couple of offers.
The process is: when you find a good offer, you sign a Letter of Intent between you and the buyer. It blocks you from accepting offers from other potential buyers.
In this period they do the due diligence on your product, you need to describe the technical aspects of your product and the business. And you can still negotiate on the final price.
If this phase goes well and everyone is happy, you sign an Asset Purchase Agreement (APA) which is a contract that finalizes the exchange of assets of your product between you and the buyer, and it sets the payment method, amount, and date.
When you sign the APA, you’re done with the deal. The remaining part is the hand-off of the assets.
I hope this article was helpful and inspiring, even if a bit long.
If you have any questions, drop me a message.
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