Apologies for the terrible title!
I recently completed the sale of some iOS code that makes up my room booking app, Roomr (www.roomrapp.com) to a company in Belgium. A user on Twitter asked if I would write a short post on the sale and voila, here it is.
To give you some background, my app Roomr is a simple iOS app that connects up to Microsoft Exchange and allows you to view the status of meeting rooms. In addition, you can see a room’s full daily calendar and also book meeting rooms. All from your iPhone. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the only app of it’s kind.
Despite it’s uniqueness, sales have been very slow, topping around 25 a month. I’m putting this down to a few factors, but they are outside the scope of this post!
Around mid-April, I got an email from a developer in Sweden asking if I would be interesting in selling the source code of Roomr as they had an in-house project to develop an app with some similar functionality. They stated that I’d retain ownership of the code and would be able to continue developing upon it and Roomr itself would remain in the store. This seemed like a good proposition.
I just needed to put a price on my code.
I reached out to Twitter for some help and got lots of answers and suggestions. The common thread running through the responses was that the sale would be worth about 20%-30% of the total development effort. So if I spend 100 hours writing the software, I could charge for about 30 of those hours. This made some sense when I considered that I had no documentation etc.
I agreed to the sale, but my client needed to get approval before we could continue.
Time passed, as it does, when another email arrived in my inbox from a company in Belgium offering to purchase the code for Roomr and even offered a price. This price, I’m pleased to say, matched what I had quoted the Swedish developer, so having some validation there was nice. We discussed terms and they matched the previous offer i.e. I’d retain ownership and could continue to develop and sell Roomr.
I agreed to the sale and began looking into software escrow as I assumed my buyer would want some contractual guarantees as well as safeguards to their money.
The buyer didn’t seem interested in that and offers to wire me the money in exchange for the code to be sent via email. I was surprised by this. Perhaps I’m getting too cynical, but it was nice to be trusted like that. I agreed that once the money was received, I’d transfer the code. I sent them an invoice and my bank details and one day later the money arrived in my account. I promptly zipped up and emailed the code over. A second email swiftly followed as I had neglected to include a 3rd party library causing compilation failures.
And that was it. The transaction was completed with all parties being happy. I managed to recoup some of the time I spent developing Roomr and I hopefully saved my buyer time understanding Objective-C driven SOAP calls to Microsoft Exchange!
Tomas McGuinness 