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A week ago I wrote about the I Am Hungry application being listed on eBay. Today, the auction ended with a winning bid of $20,100. Not bad for an application that has 600 average daily users and no growth. The application has over 250,000 users but none of the user information has been stored in the database. This amounts to a whopping $33 per active user!
It looks like whoever purchased the application used the Adonomics valuation. Based on their statistics, the buyer of this application got a $4,000 discount. Honestly, I’m not quite sure what the buyer of this application is going to get from their investment. They have very few active users. For those of you who missed out on purchasing this application: go start a blog and write in it once a day and you will end up with almost as many daily visitors. If you can’t believe it, go check out the eBay auction.
Update
Apparently you can update the profile box of each of the users. The owner can now at least do that which is pretty useful. There is no way of telling how many users still have the profile box showing though.
Well…. here is an interesting fact.. this might have helped close the deal…
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1. Installements - If the sale price is over $2,000.00, we are willing to accept payment by installements of $1,000.00 per month. 2. Rebate - If you are not interested in the 30 hours of consulting, for every unused hour you will receive a $150/hr rebate.
Well…. here is an interesting fact.. this might have helped close the deal…
=========================================================
1. Installements - If the sale price is over $2,000.00, we are willing to accept payment by installements of $1,000.00 per month. 2. Rebate - If you are not interested in the 30 hours of consulting, for every unused hour you will receive a $150/hr rebate.
Nick,
As I said in my post a few days ago, when I first saw the I am Hungry app on eBay:
http://blog.adonomics.com/2007/09/24/an-adonomi...
>
After my post, Dan Peguine put a link to the Adonomics valuation at the bottom of the auction listing and Altura Ventures did what it could to spread the word about the app and our view of its value being much higher than the $1500 to $1600 range. I also advised him that an installment sale was a better structure because it would allow the buyer to re-coop the price overtime from the advertising potential that the app represented. Since Dan didn’t need the money right away and since his Intellectual Property would come back to him if he wasn’t fully paid, it was an easy way to get the bidding to go beyond the $1600 range.
In the last hour before the auction ended, the bidding jumped over $20,100 (which met Dan’s new reserve price) and
effectively ended the auction.
As Nick mentions, this is particularly impressive for an app with only around 600 active users and fits in with Altura Ventures’ view that the total install base of an app and the square inches of the 250,000 users’ profile pages that “I am Hungry” controls is worth a significant amount.
IMHO, had “I am Hungry” received an “Adonomics Certified Valuation” by providing their Google Analytics data
it is likely their valuation would have gone up significantly and this might have led to even a higher price.
In any case, this bodes well for all facebook developers and I also want to announce that Adonomics will be offering to all facebook developers that want to sell their app a brokerage service where we will do our best to help them get prices at or near their Adonomics Valuations.
Had we provided this service for Dan, I would have suggested that in addition to offering an installment sale approach and getting an Adonomics Certified Valuation that they should have shifted the app into something that showed the logos of the restaurants that their hungry users were thinking of going to. In addition, they should have had a default restaurant choice be something like the “McDonalds — I’m Lovin’ It” logo or “Outback SteakHouse” or “Applebees” logos showing on the user’s page. This way there would be a Let’s Eat Out app that would have shown each friend’s restaurant choice/logo on 250,000 profile pages.
I’m confident that Adonomics could have sold this app for $100K to $250K to the ad agency for McDonalds in a sponsorship deal that would have been lovin’ it if they could have instanly been on the home page of 250,000 users who were too in-active to change their resturaunt setting. And, because this is part of the app itself, it wouldn’t even be a violation of facebook’s TOS about no ads on the profile page.
If you are a developer with an app to sell, friend me and message me in facebook with the particulars about your app and then feel free to give me a call if you have questions at 831-595-7501.
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures — the first facebook-only VC
Nick,
As I said in my post a few days ago, when I first saw the I am Hungry app on eBay:
http://blog.adonomics.com/2007/09/24/an-adonomics-valuation-is-the-key-to-not-undervaluing-your-app/
>
After my post, Dan Peguine put a link to the Adonomics valuation at the bottom of the auction listing and Altura Ventures did what it could to spread the word about the app and our view of its value being much higher than the $1500 to $1600 range. I also advised him that an installment sale was a better structure because it would allow the buyer to re-coop the price overtime from the advertising potential that the app represented. Since Dan didn’t need the money right away and since his Intellectual Property would come back to him if he wasn’t fully paid, it was an easy way to get the bidding to go beyond the $1600 range.
In the last hour before the auction ended, the bidding jumped over $20,100 (which met Dan’s new reserve price) and
effectively ended the auction.
As Nick mentions, this is particularly impressive for an app with only around 600 active users and fits in with Altura Ventures’ view that the total install base of an app and the square inches of the 250,000 users’ profile pages that “I am Hungry” controls is worth a significant amount.
IMHO, had “I am Hungry” received an “Adonomics Certified Valuation” by providing their Google Analytics data
it is likely their valuation would have gone up significantly and this might have led to even a higher price.
In any case, this bodes well for all facebook developers and I also want to announce that Adonomics will be offering to all facebook developers that want to sell their app a brokerage service where we will do our best to help them get prices at or near their Adonomics Valuations.
Had we provided this service for Dan, I would have suggested that in addition to offering an installment sale approach and getting an Adonomics Certified Valuation that they should have shifted the app into something that showed the logos of the restaurants that their hungry users were thinking of going to. In addition, they should have had a default restaurant choice be something like the “McDonalds — I’m Lovin’ It” logo or “Outback SteakHouse” or “Applebees” logos showing on the user’s page. This way there would be a Let’s Eat Out app that would have shown each friend’s restaurant choice/logo on 250,000 profile pages.
I’m confident that Adonomics could have sold this app for $100K to $250K to the ad agency for McDonalds in a sponsorship deal that would have been lovin’ it if they could have instanly been on the home page of 250,000 users who were too in-active to change their resturaunt setting. And, because this is part of the app itself, it wouldn’t even be a violation of facebook’s TOS about no ads on the profile page.
If you are a developer with an app to sell, friend me and message me in facebook with the particulars about your app and then feel free to give me a call if you have questions at 831-595-7501.
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures — the first facebook-only VC
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I think you are confusing daily active users with total active users in arriving at your $33 number. If there are 600 people a day using the app and each day it’s a different 600, then there could be 18,000 active users a month. The real total will obviously be lower, but it’s not unreasonable to assume around 10,000 people using the app at least once a month, so the valuation would be closer to $2/active user.
I think you are confusing daily active users with total active users in arriving at your $33 number. If there are 600 people a day using the app and each day it’s a different 600, then there could be 18,000 active users a month. The real total will obviously be lower, but it’s not unreasonable to assume around 10,000 people using the app at least once a month, so the valuation would be closer to $2/active user.
AppStars is open for business and invites developers who would like to sell a great application, or a not so great application with awesome potential - like I Am Hungry - to contact us. Please email all details and information about your application to info@appstars.com and we will do our best to respond to you.
Nick, your numbers are way off, you should probably consider correcting this to protect your credibility.
Hmm … how are my numbers off?
Tom: you may be right that there could be 18,000 people using the application on a regular basis. Only the google analytics as well as internal statistics could show this.
Unfortunately this was not provided so technically this was sold at $33 per active user.
AppStars is open for business and invites developers who would like to sell a great application, or a not so great application with awesome potential - like I Am Hungry - to contact us. Please email all details and information about your application to info@appstars.com and we will do our best to respond to you.
Nick, your numbers are way off, you should probably consider correcting this to protect your credibility.
Hmm … how are my numbers off?
Tom: you may be right that there could be 18,000 people using the application on a regular basis. Only the google analytics as well as internal statistics could show this.
Unfortunately this was not provided so technically this was sold at $33 per active user.
[...] has posted an article suggesting that the I Am Hungry application auction that I broke the news about a couple days ago, was a set up. I admit that the auction looks like there were significant jumps [...]
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hey, appstars, how come you haven’t responded to my email(s)?
hey, appstars, how come you haven’t responded to my email(s)?