Winding down is sometimes the right call. It is also frequently chosen by founders who never spent the two weeks it takes to find out whether anyone would buy the company. This page is the comparison, done honestly, including the cases where closing is genuinely better than selling.
Winding down is not free. It has a bill, a timeline and a set of obligations that survive the decision, and founders routinely underestimate all three.
Whatever cash is left after every obligation is settled, which is frequently nothing.
A price for the company, in cash at close, plus the obligations transferring to the buyer.
Legal and accounting fees, final payroll, lease settlements, and often a personal guarantee coming due.
Legal fees, and your time through diligence.
Three to six months to do it properly, longer with a lease or debt in the picture.
Sixty days to a cash buyer, three to six months through other routes.
Redundancy, with whatever notice and reference you can give them.
In most cases they keep their jobs, and under permanent capital they keep their manager too.
A migration deadline and an apology. Some of them built processes on your product.
Continuity. The product keeps running and the contracts transfer.
A total loss, and a conversation you'll have anyway.
Something back, and a waterfall to negotiate rather than a write-off.
Personal guarantees, tax filings, and directors' obligations that survive dissolution.
Warranties and an escrow period, both bounded and written down.
Four questions. Answer them honestly and you'll know within a minute whether the two weeks is worth spending.
Each one maps to something a buyer checks in the first hour. Nothing here is a trick, and there's no wrong answer that ends the conversation on its own.
We'd rather say this plainly than have a founder spend three months discovering it. There are situations where no buyer exists and pretending otherwise wastes the last of your money.
A product with no paying customers has no cash flow to buy. What might sell is the code, the domain or the team, and that's an asset sale worth far less than a company sale.
If you're the only person who can deploy, support and sell it, a buyer is purchasing a job with a handover risk attached. That's a much smaller market and a much lower price.
Unassigned contractor work, a co-founder who left without signing, or a licence you can't transfer. Fixable if you have months, fatal if you have weeks.
If five credible buyers have seen real numbers and said no, that's information rather than bad luck. Close it properly and keep the last of the money for doing so.
Test whether a buyer exists before you decide. Two weeks and three emails will tell you. Founders wind down companies with real recurring revenue far more often than they should, usually because selling never seemed like an available option.
Curious is a long-term holding company that buys and grows software companies with empathy.
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