Somebody built it. Somebody else should own it next.
What Indiemaker is, who is behind it, and where the work is still unfinished.
Every asset on the same fields.
Indiemaker is a platform for discovering, comparing and transferring small internet businesses, from $1,000 to $500,000. Every asset on it carries the same fields, in the same units, with the source of every number stated beside it. That is what makes any two of them comparable, and it is the whole product.
The rest follows from that. A market view you can cut by asking price, revenue, age and owner hours. A comparison that puts two assets side by side without reformatting either one to flatter it. A handover run as a checklist both sides can read before they start. Payment moves once, directly between the two people involved. We never hold it.
Software gets built to launch, not to change hands.
A project that has stopped being interesting to the person who made it is often still worth a great deal to someone who would otherwise spend eighteen months building the same thing. The distance between those two valuations is wide, and nearly every price inside it works for both of them.
It closes far less often than it should. The numbers live in screenshots that could say anything. There is no second asset to read the first one against. The handover gets improvised from scratch by two people who have never done it before and are each quietly wary of the other. So the deal dies in the messages, or it never starts.
Every one of those failures is structural. Structure is the one thing you can build.
I wrote this down in 2013 and did nothing about it for five years.
I ran a software studio, building products for other founders. The companies came apart for reasons that had nothing to do with what we had built: a cap table nobody could unpick, a co-founder who left, someone who moved country.
The software was fine. It was just owned by a company that no longer existed, and there was no way to get it out.
Somebody would have paid for it. There was nobody to pay, and nothing to buy.
I wrote “digital asset platform” in a notebook and carried on.
In 2018 I went looking for something to buy instead of something to build. In January 2019 I bought the small directory this platform grew out of. It was called 1kprojects: open-source PHP, a modest monthly revenue, running costs of almost nothing. Its founder and I agreed a price over an email thread that lasted four days. I had never met him, had never been to his country, and had no way of checking most of what he told me.
It went well. It also took far longer than it needed to, and almost every step was improvised: the domain, the server, the code, the two mailing lists, the payment account, the user export. There was no template. Each piece was worked out on the spot by two people doing it for the first time.
That transaction is the one Indiemaker structures.
The lines we will not blur.
Five commitments that hold whatever else changes about the platform.
| The money | The transfer happens once, directly between the owner and the new owner, with the funds held by Escrow.com. Indiemaker never holds them and never takes a position in a deal. Our success fee comes out of the owner's proceeds on a completed transfer, never added on top of what the new owner pays. |
| The numbers | Revenue, costs and customer counts are declared by the owner. Every field is marked declared derived or platform, so you can see which is which. We do not audit a business. |
| The sides | We do not represent either party or negotiate on anyone's behalf, and we are never inside the negotiation. The success fee is a percentage, so a higher price does earn us more, and we would rather say so than claim an indifference we do not have. |
| The market data | Published as anonymised shares of the whole market, never a route to an individual owner or asset. What has not been declared is shown as not declared, never estimated. |
| The claims | Nothing on this site asserts a number we cannot back. |
Some of this is built. Some of it is not, and we mark which.
You will find things on this site labelled as concepts. The permanent ownership record is one: a record that survives the sale, so that the next valuation can sit on a price somebody actually paid instead of an asking price nobody accepted. It is labelled an idea because that is what it is today.
We would rather show the thinking early and be told it is wrong. Anything not marked that way is the platform as it works now.
This page is the argument. The market is the evidence.
Nothing here is worth as much to you as twenty minutes reading the assets themselves.