Last week we announced the sale of Expens’d to Still River Software (SRS for brevity). Once the price was negotiated, the real work of transferring the application and all associated IP to SRS began. What follows is a checklist of everything we had to do in order to make this transfer, which took more than a few days, happen. If you have additional questions please post them as comments and I’ll do my best to answer them quickly.
What You Have to Move
Domain Name and SSL Cert: the first thing to go is the domain name. If you use GoDaddy.com, it’s a simple matter of entering in their email address and clicking “Ok.” The SSL cert moved along nicely with the domain name. Here’s a link to the instructions on GoDaddy for moving a domain name.
Source Code: we use GitHub private accounts for all of our apps and some of our customers. You can simply give the purchasing company access, get them to check out a copy of the code, and then kill the repo after you ensure you have the latest copy on your computer, and have it backed up, in multiple places. Big note here: if you are going to offer any support after the sale, ensure that you know where the code was when you handed it over.
Hosting: we host many sites on Slicehost. All it took to move the entire slice was an email from both parties requesting it. I think it took longer for us to find out that that was how it worked than it took to move the slice between accounts. I <3 Slicehost.
Twitter Account: log in to the Twitter account, change the password, log out, provide the password to the buyer, and you’re good to go.
Facebook Fan Page: as simple as Twitter – make the person and admin and you’re off.
GetSatisfaction Site (GS): the GS people told me that they cannot directly move a GS support site from one company to another. So how we handled this was by doing a CSV export of all Expens’d data, providing that to the buyer, and deleting the app from our GS account.
Email, Docs, Etc.: if you have the domain email and docs being handled by Google Apps, be sure to remove the domain alias from your account so that the buyer can register for Google Apps.
Documentation: while not something you have to necessarily move, provide any and all documentation you have on the app. This could come in the form of access to your project management system.
Advertising on Your Site: once you get the check in hand, remove all traces of the app from your site. Then do a press release telling everyone what just happened.
What They Have to Change
Depending on the functionality of your application, there can be a number of things that the purchasing company needs to update very quickly. Here’s everything we encountered.
Merchant Account: we use Authorize.net (as much as I hate it) for payment processing. Unless they want you to continue to get revenue from the app you just sold, those numbers need to be changed very quickly.
SMTP Service: we use authsmtp.net for outgoing emails for our apps. Have this changed unless you want to pay for emails no longer going out via your app.
Google Analytics (GA): this is fairly minimal, and simply requires changing a number, hopefully in a view or template. I would also recommend giving your buyer access to the current GA account so that they can see the kind of traffic you’ve been getting, and explain any traffic spikes that may have occurred. This helps them to better understand the customer base and hit the ground running.
Branding: this really depends on how independent your SaaS app is from the rest of your company. When we started building our apps we had a grand vision of developing a fully integrated suite of products. Obviously that didn’t happen, but we went well down the road. Scrum’d, Expens’d, and Prioritiz’d were all designed to functionally look and work the same. The deal I made here is that the only branding aspect that needed to change upon sale was the logo. The rest of the design will be changed, or perhaps improved, over time. But no rush for us on that one.
S3 Backups: if you aren’t backing up your apps and database to Amazon S3 on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis, then God help you. If you are and you have it configured in your app, get the buyer to move the automatic backups to their S3 account, and keep a few for yourself as well, just in case.
Legal Stuff
I was going to title this section legal crap, but I resisted the urge. Making sure that having everyting legal in place is important. I’m not an attorney so I won’t offer any advice here. But I highly suggesting speaking with an attorney and getting things written, paper or otherwise. Mainly I think it’ll be about you giving up the rights to the intellectual property (IP) to the app.
And I Think That’s It
I believe that is the list of everything we did. If you’ve sold an app and have anything else to add to the list, please do so in the comments. Happy selling!
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rob Bazinet, Jeff Schoolcraft and Mike Morris, Ivan Cherevko. Ivan Cherevko said: Business Checklist for Selling a SaaS Application: Last week we announced the sale of Expens’d to Still River Softwa… http://kl.am/6A1A [...]