HACKER Q&A
📣 cph_dev

How to sell a developer tool with 1M users


Hi,

We are three developers and we have built a developer tool in our free time, This tool is a subset of Project management tools and mainly used by development teams. Long story short, during Covid it became very popular and still is Number 1 in organic search on Google. We have more than one million users from every company in the world you can think of.

The tool is based on a freemium model with most of the features available as free, and we have a paid tier as well. The tool is used heavily with 180000-220000 users sessions and around 15000 new signups every month. We have spent zero amount on marketing and have not spent any efforts on sales etc.

All the growth is organic and word of mouth marketing. We believe for the people with sales and marketing skills there is huge potential to either make it a real business with a very good MRR or it can be a good strategic investment for any big player like MIRO, Monday or click up etc. Where they can acquire Million users from large enterprises and then use their sales teams to generate revenue out of it.

Now we are looking for some advice on how to approach those large players and negotiate with them etc. What is the standard process in Silicon Valley around this, we are based in Europe and would like to get some advice, input or potential contacts etc.

Thanks in advance!


  👤 rishabhkaul1 Accepted Answer ✓
Hey, congrats on the growth guys! Drop me an email, happy to share some advice around this. I've run small acquisitions for companies and have some specific ideas that can help you guys (ofcourse, its all free advice).

The best case scenario is where you have inbound offers.

But typically all these ideas will revolve around a couple of things: - Figuring out the right mix of companies of companies that will value this - Figuring out the right people to connect with (it's not always corp-dev) and tactical advice around how to reach them - Other creative stuff (like using influencers to your advantage)

rishabhkaul at gmail dot com I am based in London, so similar timezone to you.


👤 mtmail
https://acquire.com/sellers/ is cost-free. There's also brokers specialized in tech startups like https://feinternational.com/

👤 brucethemoose2
Assuming its open source, a recent HN post on this: https://reactflow.dev/blog/asking-for-money-for-open-source/