How I sold Bitzuma in five months

Bitzuma started in May 2025 and was sold in October 2025: a crypto news, analysis and interviews publication. Five months from idea to exit, while the two projects before it had burned twenty four months without producing anything anyone wanted to buy.

The difference was not luck or timing. It was that for the first time I built something that could run without me, and that is the only property that makes a project sellable.

A project is sellable when it works without the person who built it

A buyer is not buying your work. They are buying a flow that continues after you leave the room. Everything that lives only in your head is, from the buyer's point of view, a transfer cost rather than an asset.

With 21BJ and Sp3llbound I had built the opposite: two products where every detail depended on decisions of mine that were written down nowhere. Anyone buying them would have bought a project to redo, not one to run. Nobody bought them, and that was the correct outcome.

Bitzuma was different in three ways:

• It published daily in a repeatable format. News, analysis, interviews: three formats, not one personal style. You can hand a format to someone else. You cannot hand over a style.
• The audience was the thing being sold, not the site. The code behind a publication is worth little. The people reading it every day are worth something, and they are the only part that is hard to rebuild from scratch.
• The process was written outside my head. Where the sources are, how you pick what to publish, who to contact for interviews. Boring to write, and the reason the negotiation was short.

Why media worked where product had failed

Because with a publication the feedback arrives in twenty four hours instead of twenty four months. You publish, and you know immediately whether anyone read it. With a game you can spend a year building before discovering the problem matters to nobody.

It is the same lesson as the shut down projects, read backwards. The flaw in 21BJ was not the game: it was the length of the cycle between a decision and the proof it was wrong. Bitzuma had a short cycle by construction, so I corrected course weekly instead of finding everything out at the end.

I am not saying media beats product. I am saying that if you do not yet know whether you are right, pick the thing that tells you sooner.

What buyers look at, in order

In the negotiation the questions came almost always in this order, and it is not the order I expected:

1. How much of the traffic depends on a single source. A project living 90% on one channel is worth exactly as much as that channel's next algorithm change.
2. How recurring the incoming money is. A small repeated amount weighs more than a large one off, because it is the only one you can project forward.
3. How many hours a week it takes to keep running. Not "how good is it": how much human time it costs. That number decides whether the buyer can run it alongside their other things.
4. What breaks when you leave. Personal relationships, access, interview contacts. This is where the written process made the difference.
5. The code. Last, and almost as a formality. Nobody opened the repository before the first four points were settled.

If you have any intention of selling something one day, those five points are also a good list of what to build from the start.

What I would do differently

I would keep the numbers in order from day one. I spent more time reconstructing historical data for the negotiation than it would have taken to record it as I went. Buyers ask for time series, not screenshots.

And I would separate my name from the brand earlier. The more a project is tied to your face, the more ambiguous what you are selling becomes: the publication, or you? It worked out with Bitzuma, but it is a tension I now manage from the start by keeping the products separate from the personal site.

Frequently asked questions

How much did you sell Bitzuma for?

The terms are not public. What I can say is that the price formed almost entirely on the audience and the repeatability of the process, not on the technology.

Are five months a normal timeline for an exit?

No, it is short. It worked because the project was small, clear and transferable, and because the buyer was already in the sector. A software product with paying users usually takes far longer in due diligence.

Would you recommend building with an exit in mind?

No, but I would recommend building with transferability in mind, which sounds like the same thing and is not. A transferable project is easier to run even if you never sell it, because it means it does not depend entirely on you.

Why did you not continue with media?

Because I wanted to go back to building product, this time alone and with a different method. I wrote about it in from co-founder to solo founder.