“I Just Sold This to Someone Who Thinks He Can Do It Better Than Me”: The Unexpected Emotions Behind a $Million E-Commerce Exit

When Benjamin Seer finally signed the papers to sell EverCleaner, his sustainable cleaning brand that saved a million plastic bottles from landfills, he didn’t pop champagne. Instead, he felt something completely unexpected: doubt.

“I kind of thought, I just sold this to someone who thinks he can do it better than me,” Benjamin admits. “Why didn’t I, why can’t I do it as good as him? And I kind of started questioning why we sold it.”

It’s the emotion most founders never talk about after an exit. But for Benjamin and his co-founder Casper, selling their profitable e-commerce business on Flippa wasn’t just about the numbers, it was about confronting what success really meant to them.

From Breakfast Subscriptions to Cleaning Revolution

Benjamin’s entrepreneurial journey didn’t start with EverCleaner. In 2016, he launched Hummingbird, a healthy breakfast subscription service, where he got an unexpected education in packaging. Specifically, how difficult it is to make food packaging sustainable.

“Food obviously has a best before date and the less barriers, the less long the shelf life,” Benjamin explains. “So I was kind of forced into looking into packaging quite a lot.”

After selling Hummingbird, that packaging obsession stuck with him. When he noticed a rising trend of concentrated cleaning tabs, products you add water to at home, the lightbulb went off.

“It was a no-brainer. We kind of didn’t even have to talk about it very long,” Benjamin says about pitching the idea to Casper. “This is something really cool.”

EverCleaner was born with a clear mission: reduce single-use plastic bottles while offering eco-friendly cleaning products that actually worked. The tangible goal of saving a million plastic bottles became the heart of everything they built.

The Growth Strategy: Profit or Scale?

From day one, Benjamin and Casper made a strategic choice that would eventually make their exit more attractive: they focused on growth over profitability.

“We always favored growth over profit and that’s why we also grew pretty quickly,” Benjamin shares. With their online marketing backgrounds, they obsessively tracked unit economics, retention rates, and customer lifetime value—recalculating almost weekly to understand exactly how much they could invest in performance marketing.

Their core channels were Meta and TikTok, where they built a direct-to-consumer powerhouse. But when major Australian retailers came knocking, they faced a pivotal decision.

“Every now and then we got inquiries from retailers,” Benjamin recalls. “The medium-sized ones, we listed. The biggest ones – that was a huge process.”

The retail expansion seemed like an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. But it came with a cost.

“Because we knew nothing about retail packaging, how the listing works, how those negotiations usually should go, I think it took a lot of energy and time to understand that,” Benjamin admits. “In hindsight, it’s always easy to say it was a mistake, but at the time, it was very exciting.”

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just as they secured major retail placements, the Ukraine war hit, inflation spiked, and retailers pivoted their strategy toward cheaper home brands with higher margins. EverCleaner lost the shelf space they’d worked so hard to secure.

The Decision to Sell

After a few years of growth, Benjamin and Casper hit a crossroads. They were running Blitz Growth, their marketing agency, alongside EverCleaner and spreading themselves too thin.

“We kind of figured that EverCleaner is a lot of work and we’re also serving agency clients,” Benjamin says. “And we kind of are spreading ourselves too thin.”

More fundamentally, they realized that to truly scale EverCleaner’s mission, they’d need to go international. That meant setting up distribution hubs worldwide and raising significant capital.

“With a physical product, we’re trying to save emissions and save plastic, starting to ship that all over the world didn’t really work for us,” Benjamin explains. “Either we go really big and try to do it as big as possible, or we sell it.”

Both founders also realized they genuinely enjoyed the variety of agency work helping multiple businesses rather than focusing on just one.

“We both find a lot of excitement in doing marketing for various other businesses and not just one, so the agency model also really talks to us,” Benjamin shares.

The decision was made. They’d prep for a sale.

Preparing for Exit: The 12-Month Strategy

Benjamin and Casper didn’t just wake up one day and list their business. They spent nearly a year strategically preparing EverCleaner for sale.

“We actually decided about 12 months prior that we will try and sell it,” Benjamin reveals. “So we kind of prepped for that.”

Their preparation strategy was surgical:

• Reduce unprofitable spending in less efficient areas
• Stabilize revenue while maintaining growth
• Focus on EBITDA growth to attract profit-minded buyers
• Make the business attractive to small business buyers who wanted stable returns without major operational changes

“If the business was bigger, say 10 million plus, I think we wouldn’t have changed as much when it comes to profitability,” Benjamin explains. “But when we’re talking about buyers who go after small businesses, might be their biggest investment in a while, they actually want to see a return over time without having to change too much.”

They targeted a valuation multiple of around 2-2.5x profit, which aligned perfectly with what their Flippa broker, Fiona, recommended.

The Flippa Experience: Finding the Right Match

Benjamin had met Fiona, his Flippa broker, years earlier at an event. When it came time to sell, she was his first call.

“She helped us with everything,” Benjamin says. “The broker obviously does all the groundwork, sets it up, does the profile, sends out emails. She also responded to all the inquiries and kind of tried to funnel them and only give the most interesting ones to us.”

After launching in early February, the inquiries flooded in. Weekly calls with Fiona helped them navigate the process, and her experience proved invaluable, especially when it came to understanding potential buyers.

“The one who bought EverCleaner in the end was a serial Flippa customer and had bought many other businesses in the past,” Benjamin shares. “So she had dealt with him before and kind of knew the way he is and gave us tips as to what she thinks is realistic, how he’s going to operate.”

The Make-or-Break Decision

Many potential buyers wanted Benjamin and Casper to stay on board, sometimes for months or even years, with final payouts tied to performance milestones.

For most founders, this might seem reasonable. But for Benjamin and Casper, it was a dealbreaker.

“The business is now quite profitable,” Benjamin reasoned. “If we just keep it and rank in the profit for ourselves, we might as well do that rather than work for someone else and get a little bit more for the buying price.”

They were willing to take a hit on the sale price in exchange for a clean exit. And finally, they found their match.

“There was only one buyer who really offered that,” Benjamin says. “He said, ‘Yeah, I don’t need you. I have an e-commerce team. I have many businesses. I understand marketing, I understand the product, I understand the sourcing and the logistics. You don’t have to stay on board at all. Maybe you’re available for some questions here and there, but I don’t need you.'”

That sealed the deal. By late April, just two and a half months after listing, EverCleaner had a new owner.

The Unexpected Post-Exit Emotions

When Benjamin finally signed the papers, the feeling wasn’t what he expected.

“The last negotiation took a little bit longer than we expected, so it was like two weeks where we kind of knew we’re selling it but it hadn’t actually happened,” he recalls. “So we were kind of sitting there. We weren’t sure if we’re allowed to be happy or not.”

By the time the sale closed, the excitement had already dissipated. Worse, darker thoughts crept in.

“The feeling of having sold it was underwhelming because I kind of thought, I just sold this to someone who thinks he can do it better than me,” Benjamin admits. “Unfortunately, that feeling was more overwhelming or stronger than the excitement of selling it.”

It took a few weeks for Benjamin to work through those doubts, reminding himself why they’d made the decision in the first place. They wanted to focus on their agency. They wanted variety in their work. They’d achieved what they set out to do.

“If you asked me beforehand, I thought the feeling would be different,” he reflects. “But it’s also another thing you learn and just adds to your experience. And maybe one day, who knows, we’re gonna sell another business and I’m prepared.”

Lessons for Entrepreneurs Considering an Exit

Looking back on his journey, Benjamin has clear advice for other founders:

Don’t build to sell from day one. “I think it makes it harder if you build something to sell it from day one,” Benjamin says. “If you just go in there to build something, ideally something you care about, I think that is the best way to build a business. And then maybe after a few years you can start thinking about a sale if you want to.”

Think about scalability early. “Find something that can be scaled either in your geography or something that can easily go beyond,” he advises. “If we had chosen something where internationalization would be easier, we might still be working on it.”

Have a clear omni-channel strategy. Benjamin wishes they’d been more strategic about retail from the start, either committing fully to omni-channel or staying online-only, rather than being reactive to opportunities.

Prepare thoroughly. “We really thought about it like that year prior to actually putting it online,” Benjamin shares. “We talked to people who had sold their business or had bought businesses. And we kind of understood the overall landscape.”

Know your priorities. For Benjamin and Casper, time was more valuable than maximizing the sale price. “We took a hit on the price, on the selling price, but therefore we got exactly the outcome we wanted in terms of our time, which was really, really valuable to us.”

Life After EverCleaner

Today, Benjamin is fully focused on Blitz Growth, where he helps e-commerce businesses and apps master Meta and performance marketing. The agency’s mission is creating great content that’s properly structured to return meaningful learnings, combining creativity with data.

And would he build and sell another business?

“I don’t doubt it,” Benjamin says confidently. “I’m definitely going to build another one.”

Looking back on those three years building EverCleaner, Benjamin’s perspective has shifted dramatically.

“Three years felt like a long time while we were grinding. But when you look back at it, three years is absolutely nothing,” he reflects. “If you think about how much you can do in three years, I don’t know what we’re going to do in 10 years—that’s kind of the exciting part.”