BITPORTERS ltd.

Yesterday we posted Dashboardthemes.com to the Sitepoint marketplace. We’ve listed the opening bid at $2,500.

Matt has posted a great entry about why we are letting this go. Bang on Matt - I don’t have anything to add to that, however I want to say that in the hands of the right person - I’m sure DBT can earn some decent revenue. I think the lesson Matt and I learned here is that we needed to set more financial goals before setting out to do a project like this. “Build it and they will come” worked for our users, but not that easy for revenue. All we wanted to do was solve a problem - we weren’t stoked on the idea of knocking on doors, preparing reports and long conference calls to sell ad deals.

For a bit of a technical brief - DashboardThemes is written in ASP.net 2.0 using C#. This is my 3rd iteration of my high-volume n-Tier CMS framework that I’ve been working on over the years (I have 5+ years total ASP.net experience). I personally think this app is one of the best / most polished pieces of code I’ve ever put out. If you were to buy this system as-is with no intentions of upgrading, there is little you would have to worry about. On it’s current server with it’s current design it could be on Digg.com (again) and the only bottleneck would be the servers CPU/Bandwidth. However if your goal includes major development, my object-orientated design is very simple and clean - a properly trained MCAD/MCSD .NET developer would have no trouble modifying this application.

So it’s hard to let my baby go, but at the same time it will be great to see someone take this app into the big leagues. Personally I would love to see Major Nelson / the Xbox live team buy this website from us and populate it will all of the data. Seeing it being “done right” is what Matt and I want more than anything else - that was and always will be our hope for Dashboardthemes.com