The Start to Selling a Side Project

Everyone talks about indie hacking with sites Product Hunt and Indiehackers becoming more popular. However, few bring up the dark side. After struggling to get it off the ground, there is a lack of motivation, time, and disinterest in the project. Kyle, Sunny, and I all work full-time jobs. They are developers, and I am a marketer.

We used our skills to start building and to market IronMic.

We launched the site in late 2018, worked on it through 2019 but struggled with motivation. There was an early success with acquiring several podcasts for the service. Anchor Podcasting was taking off at the time, and those podcasters needed a website. We were early to the market, but soon we realized competitors, including podpages and podcast pages.

Initially, we were a strong competitor, but IronMic was an MVP product with limited features and stability issues. We started to rebuild the product through 2019, but our struggle began when Covid-19 hit – we didn’t have the motivation or energy to focus on the development. In addition, we were not keeping up features-wise with competitors who quickly began to add more features like reviews, about pages, and, more importantly, custom designs.

IronMic was targeted to beginners getting started with podcasting, paired with a podcast host like Anchor. These customers posed a challenge as they didn’t have money to invest or stick with their shows for long. However, we found the ones that fit our service but often with higher costs to acquire.

Going into 2022, we realized we cannot grow or continue building IronMic.  We debated shutting it down but opted to try and sell the brand and platform. IronMic is now listed on MicroAcquire, where we will start the process of selling what we’ve built.

Our idea around selling IronMic is a couple of crucial points:

1. First, the brand gets to live on, maybe paired with a developer or a company that could fund the startup.
2. The customers who see value can still use it, and they wouldn’t be left with a website.
3. While we didn’t turn a profit, we could recoup some money in a clean sale of IronMic.

There is still potential in the SaaS we built. There are similar services with some features that overlap with what we offer. The appeal is we have created a modern web app that could now scale with new users. Ideally, a company with a background in podcasts will buy IronMic to keep building it.

If you’re interested in learning more about IronMic or buying it from us, tweet me @leonhitchens.