UPDATE: GrabUp has been sold at the “Buy It Now” price of $20,000 USD. That’s actually half of what the initial buyout price was, but the seller cut it in half to speed up the sale.

When is it too soon to sell a site? A lot of people worry about waiting too long to sell their websites. They’re concerned if they don’t strike while the iron is hot, and cash in on recent revenue stats, that they might not make the most possible from the sale of their sites.

An Example of Selling Too Soon?

There’s a great Mac-only piece of software out there called GrabUp that lets you quickly take snapshots of your screen and upload them to the web for you to share with others. The program is snappy and the system for uploading is extremely fast and efficient. It’s a great product that just recently launched an extended version that, for a small cost, lets you get even more out of the software. The future looks bright for GrabUp.

That future, unfortunately, is going to belong to someone other than the program’s creator.

GrabUp is currently up for sale over at SitePoint. This sale comes only one week after the “pro” version of the software has been available. In that week the profit has been $1,060. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at and the owner is using that figure to justify their “Buy It Now” price.

It feels to me like the seller might be rushing into this one a bit. I obviously don’t know, or pretend to know, their financial situation of course. But with sales figures like that so early in the game, with little promotion from what the seller is claiming, it seems like they’d be better served holding on for at least a few more months.

Here’s the other problem with selling so fast. It makes potential buyers skeptical. You immediately ask yourself, when first seeing this sale, “Why is he selling already? What’s the problem?” If you do a little research, you find out GrabUp has actually been up for sale before and then the deal was cancelled. That’s going to raise concern as well.

Software is a tricky game to play. I know that from experience working at the enterprise level. It’s just as hard at the consumer level, of course. But when you have an apparent hit on your hands it might be best to stick to it and see where it leads you. As opposed to jumping ship for your next project at the first sight of a payday.