eBay as an Exit Evolves: web2.0forsale.com

Ready to sell your Web 2.0 company yet and move on to your next project? We were last year with Huckabuck.com, and our only channel for getting the word out there was to create an auction and list it on eBay. The eBay as an exit strategy has been used a few times since then, but as far as I’m aware, none as rich as the Kiko sale.

Enter web2.0forsale.com. Beyond the creative use of subdomain a la del.icio.us, this site is interesting to me for several reasons:

1. eBay provides a great platform to sell a company, but you still have to do your own marketing. You can’t just list a company on eBay and expect people to find it, much less seriously consider buying it. You have to get the word out to the right audience that your company is for sale. Web2.0forsale.com potentially solves this by aggregating the demand for Web2.0 companies at various stages of completion and success

2. With the friction to getting a company off the ground continuing to drop, it makes a lot of sense for a project to go through various owners each contributing something different throughout its life cycle. Different owners will have varying risk tolerances and access to capital, and essentially a marketplace like this becomes a farm league for companies.

Now, that being said, the idea of a efficient marketplace for projects/companies is still purely conceptual. Most of what I found on web2.0forsale.com is a mixture of Web 2.0 sounding domains for sale (how many Flickr-style vowelly-challenged “r” names do we need). There was an occasional mashup of Digg-style voting or RSS aggregation, but overall I didn’t see anything too great for sale yet. But hey, how often do interesting web companies come up for sale?

Bottom line: If I were selling Huckabuck again, I think web2.0forsale.com would be a great channel. They will probably attract traffic as web-voyeurs check in to see who’s putting their project up for sale. Think of it as the Web2.0 salvage yard for companies trying to avoid the deadpool.

Thanks Frantic Industries & TechCrunch for the tips.