Every indie hacker who has ever thought about selling a side project hits the same wall: how much will it actually sell for?
Not "what is it worth" — a calculator will happily spit out a number for that. The real question is what a buyer will actually pay. And those are not the same number.
The asking price is a guess
Here's the uncomfortable math. Across thousands of small business sales, the final sale price lands at about 85% of the asking price on average — roughly a 15% haircut. And that's for reasonably priced listings. Overprice it and you don't get negotiated down, you get skipped — serious buyers can't tell how far you'll come off an inflated number, so they never inquire.
The asking price is something you invent, about a business only you are selling, for buyers you haven't met. The one group whose opinion decides the sale had zero say in it.
Enter the exit bid
There's a cleaner word for the number you actually want. An exit bid is a real offer a buyer places on a digital business at exit — committed money, not an asking price, not a valuation estimate.
The distinction is direction:
- A valuation and an asking price both travel toward the market, carrying your hopes.
- An exit bid travels from the market, carrying money.
It's the only number in the whole process produced by the side of the table that actually pays. Stack up competing bids under one deadline and you get a market exit bid — the price the market will actually pay for a digital business at exit, discovered through bids rather than estimated by a formula. (full definition here.)
Why we all guess instead
Not because founders are lazy — because for anything under ~$1M, nobody ever handed us the answer. Big companies run a "market check" before selling: an investment bank solicits competing bids and the board learns the real price first. That costs six figures and starts at deals in the tens of millions.
For a $5K–$500K SaaS or content site, that machine simply doesn't exist as a product. So you pick a number and wait. The guess isn't a mistake — it's the missing instrument.
Test the demand before you commit
The interesting part: you can now see your number before paying to list. There's a free demo floor where you run your business through a mock auction, real buyers place demo bids, and you read what the market gives back — a demand test, not a listing. If you like the number, you take it live for real.
If you've ever stared at a valuation calculator wondering whether it's fiction, that's the gap it closes: get your market exit bid instead of guessing one.
Curious about the mechanics — five-day windows, capped supply, why competing bids beat a single offer? The exit bid glossary and the asking-price-vs-exit-bid breakdown go deeper.
Top comments (0)