Back in 2008 I started a SAAS for professional photographers without any outside funding. I brought in another developer around the same time and it’s just been the two of us working full time on it ever since. In the beginning we were making enough money to pay the bills, attend trade shows, do some marketing and advertising…etc. But, these days we’re barely making enough to pay the bills. Our application has grown so large that it takes us forever to make any significant updates since it’s just the two of us and we don’t have a large dev team and can’t afford one. During the last few years, other competitors have popped up offering a more polished basic solution, but with a heck of a lot less features, for a much lower price. We’ve tried lowering our pricing and coming up with more attractive monthly plans but they’ve had little if no impact on sales.
The only way that I can see becoming competitive again would be to completely rewrite our entire application to make it more attractive to new customers. This would require bringing on a development team with cash that we don’t have. I don’t have any experience with funding so I’m not sure if that’s even an option at this point.
Selling the business seems like it might be another option but again, I don’t have any experience in this area and wouldn’t know where to begin finding potential buyers or how to even determine a value.
On a different and unrelated yet somewhat related note, I had an idea for a new wearable hardware product and built a rough but fully functional prototype that I think has some huge potential. I feel lost and not sure where to focus my limited energy and resources. Ideally, I’d like to save or sell my current business and start something fresh and new at the same time, but I’m afraid that might be wishful thinking. Thoughts?