Entrepreneurial Principles: Should you sell, or are you having too much fun?

6 Rules to Consider When planning to Sell Your Community

1. Do not listen to free advice.
   
2. Do not discuss your plan with your relatives.
3. Do not develop an inflated idea of how much your community worths.
4. Look for strategic buyers before selling to a financial buyer (see below).
   
5. No one every lost money selling too soon: Do not rush selling your community. Wait for the right moment before selling. Your chance will finally come.
   
6. Consider selling to the public: If you can't find anyone to sell, that's ok. Try the public.
   

Strategic Buyers v.s. Financial Buyer

Strategic buyers are the ones who would like to have your community as a part of their business. They see the real value in your community. Financial buyers, on the other hand, seeks short-term capital gain. Their main goal is to come in, restructure your community to increase its value, and resell it to the others. They do not see the real value of your community, and therefore tend to offer much less benefits.

Arbitrage Flip: What a financial buyer is looking for.

Arbitrage means something can be purchased inexpensively in one market, and can be sold in expensively in another market. Financial buyers may spot an arbitrage opportunity. They may spend little money buying your community, and sell it dearly to a company who is looking for an online community. So why don't you sell your community to one of those strategic buyers.


Checklist for Those Who Want to Sell an Online Community

1. Positioning: Get to the best position to get the best offer
2. Clean out the fat from your company: Make thing more efficient.
   
3. The rate of increase in the number of members is important.
4. High renewal rate of members
5. Do not discuss about the plan to sell. Keep it secret.
   

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About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.

Source: Social Network Business Model by David Silver, Chapter 7.
For more details, get this book online @ books.google.com [Link]