Over the past week, I've been shopping Lightbox7.com to potential buyers. Sometime yesterday, I came to an agreement with a buyer and will be transferring the site over next week.

It's come time for me to man up and realize that I cannot do everything I think I'm capable of doing; I must admit to myself that I must prioritize the things in my life, just like everybody else. Time is wasting away far too much to be bogged down with too many projects.

With server costs that I am loathe to pay, I realized that selling one of my sites was my best option. It would provide me with short-term capital to invest in my other sites while freeing up server use. The one site that came to mind was LB7.

From an economical standpoint, dropping Lightbox7.com was a no-brainer. Currently it's sitting on my most expensive server (1.7Ghz Celeron with 1GB RAM; by comparison the current database server is a 1.3Ghz Celereon with 512megs RAM). It also has a solid enough user base (~2K) that I would receive bids that would high enough to be worth the whole ordeal of selling a site and transferring its rights, without being enough users that I feel like I'm "losing out" on anything.

So selling it has indeed solved many of my problems; I can now move the Tabulas/AM databases to a server that is better equipped to handle mySQL (and since they will be the only things on there, I can disable Apache and install mySQL 4.0, which should provide to be a big performance boost on those two sites. I also have some short-term capital to help pad my bad account over the upcoming months while I try to get all my projects together and launch them.

The selling part was incredibly difficult; I received three serious bids on the site. The hard part of the site is pricing it; it's a huge burden to pay for, but it has so much potential. I am not a marketing man, so I know the untapped potential to make people pay for such a site is out there; furthermore, the site is more or less complete (in an embryonic stage, sure, but everything *works* as advertised), so whoever bought it could let it go hot and start reaping the rewards of immediate marketing.

Because the site had an unsteady revenue stream, pricing it was hard. Development of the custom site would be quite expensive, but then again, it had no consistent revenue. I received about the same offer from three people ... but one person offered $500 more, so I accepted his offer.

I had to inform the other two of the sale, but then one person replied back, "Can I make a counterbid?" Another e-mail quickly followed, saying, "I really want the site, so here is my new bid: $XXXX.

The new bid was twice his old bid and exceeded the second highest bidder by a 4-figure price. I was flabberghasted.

But I had given my verbal word to the other buyer ... how could I renege on my agreement and accept this offer?

Given my bank account (although it's padded from working in Korea this summer), I was so hard-pressed not to accept the offer he put on the table... I literally was banging my head on the desk (I'm sure I confused the coworkers at my hakwon, seeing me doing this) not knowing what to do.

In the end, I decided my word was more important than accepting the higher bid. I don't want to use capital for Tabulas on a deal that I reneged on ... that would just not be right (plus bad karma).

I just hope I don't regret taking that higher offer... and I hope someday the new buyer realizes what a great deal he got on the site.

But damn, it would of been nice to buy some of the toys in my previous post (see below) with that extra cash ;)