My own experience with these types of things is that the software is not worth much at best and most likely worthless overall.
Software without a market and customers already using it is basically worthless. If you were in a hot market and had clients a competitive startup might offer some decent money but it’d be mostly for the customer list.
One time that software can hold value is when you have a unique patent or have invented something that is truly new and revolutionary. Think scientific software algorithms or long standing problems where your code can be integrated quickly and solve a problem that isn’t something people can easily replicate with just some time.
For the most part the sounds of your code is that other people could replicate it fairly readily with just some time. I am not criticizing anything, just saying it doesn’t sound like you invented anything truly new. More like you guys put things together in a way to solve a problem which likely had value to people but not enough for the software to hold substantial value without a market and user base.
You can of course try and maybe you’ll get lucky. But I’d likely say you’d have better luck carving out a library or a complete product and open source it. Then sell consulting services around it and maybe host it etc.
The costs are sunk, your best bet is trying to use the software as leverage, not trying to sell it outright. At least that’s been my experience when I had companies fail before we had real traction. I did have one offer for like $5k on software we spent ~600k developing. I held the code and integrated parts into other projects that went on to make me money.
Good luck, and maybe you can prove my experience isn’t true today.
The problem is that you cannot get customers without software.
So every software STARTS as software without customers.
I assume that the market exists since this should be the reason for the project.
No code can be replicated easily. This is a myth spread by non programmers.
Software patents are useless since the Alice case. I.e. you cannot really patent software anymore.
Since I am not sure about the current state of the project I cannot give advice, but I would try and start the business actions asap. I.e. just continue with the original plan.
Well, that's not strictly true. Doing things that don't scale (a prime target for startups) tends to include things you are just pretending is software, but you actually do by hand.
It's entirely possible to have customers before implementing the software.
I'm not talking about a landing page. I'm talking abouy something that looks automated but is really powered by people on the backend and would never scale without actual software powering the product.
It's pretty rare, but it is a thing.
Take for example TillerHQ (never used an, but it seems like a genius product). You could MVP it as a form the collects bank login info and then has a person manually copy the bank statements into a spreadsheet for the customer. Highly dicey due to privacy concerns, but it illustrates my point perfectly.
This is just plain wrong. You can sell non existing software and use those funds to actually create it.
Same as you can sell non existing real estate, or anything really
I thought this may be a good place to tell a relevant story.
I created a company with 2 co founders. I quit my day job doing support for a company in a specialized b2b accounting software industry, and started competing with them soon after.
A year of development later and we had some barely working software, and had already snagged our first client by promising them the second part would be done in the next 3 months. We hustled and got it done enough and just keep 1 step ahead of what was needed.
3 years later, we have around 10 clients, and are almost about to make a positive month and start paying off debt we incurred, towards being profitable. We sold shortly after for around 6 million split 3 ways, and had the option of doing what we were for good pay. We had been living off savings and debt for the last three years so that sounded mighty fine.
I suspect the biggest thing you get by 'walking away with the code' is that they can't sue you for immediately using the same techniques in your next venture.
So the question is what's the 'hedgehog' in the Venn Diagram between the old tech, the thing they would be willing to work on next, and what might be available/they can do themselves.
Software without a market and customers already using it is basically worthless. If you were in a hot market and had clients a competitive startup might offer some decent money but it’d be mostly for the customer list.
One time that software can hold value is when you have a unique patent or have invented something that is truly new and revolutionary. Think scientific software algorithms or long standing problems where your code can be integrated quickly and solve a problem that isn’t something people can easily replicate with just some time.
For the most part the sounds of your code is that other people could replicate it fairly readily with just some time. I am not criticizing anything, just saying it doesn’t sound like you invented anything truly new. More like you guys put things together in a way to solve a problem which likely had value to people but not enough for the software to hold substantial value without a market and user base.
You can of course try and maybe you’ll get lucky. But I’d likely say you’d have better luck carving out a library or a complete product and open source it. Then sell consulting services around it and maybe host it etc.
The costs are sunk, your best bet is trying to use the software as leverage, not trying to sell it outright. At least that’s been my experience when I had companies fail before we had real traction. I did have one offer for like $5k on software we spent ~600k developing. I held the code and integrated parts into other projects that went on to make me money.
Good luck, and maybe you can prove my experience isn’t true today.