11–20 of 22 posts
The fear that there will be a lot of customers who fail to reenroll after the transfer is well founded. Ditto to the idea that it wouldn't survive independent of the 37signals brand. Consequently, an opening bid at greater than one year revenue is much too high.
Also a lot of people paying for it may have been attracted by the 37 signals brand.
The comments on the listing might explain why they haven't gotten any bids. 37Signals seems to be relying on their name to sell Sortfolio as opposed to using best practices for selling sites on flippa. They haven't provided any traffic/revenue proof, responded to questions, or put any visible effort into the sale beyond listing it. Sounds like they aren't too serious about selling it on flippa.com.
I think they set the minimum bid too high. The fear that there will be a lot of customers who fail to reenroll after the transfer is well founded. Ditto to the idea that it wouldn't survive independent of the 37signals brand. Consequently, an opening bid at greater than one year revenue is much too high.
The comments on the listing might explain why they haven't gotten any bids. 37Signals seems to be relying on their name to sell Sortfolio as opposed to using best practices for selling sites on flippa. They haven't provided any traffic/revenue proof, responded to questions, or put any visible effort into the sale beyond listing it. Sounds like they aren't too serious about selling it on flippa.com.
They blogged about the sale. I think one of the bigger turn offs might be the fact that the new owner will have to get everyone to setup their payment method once they switch. Because the current payment system relies on 37Signal's own.
My guess is they just put the listing on flippa to attract attention. I'll bet there have been bids but nobody is paying attention to the listing and accepting them.
They certainly haven't done any of the basics, such as answering questions. One commenter wrote, "For all we know, he is dead as he has not replied to ANY questions."
I, for one, am not impressed by their behavior. It just screams arrogance.
Let's see if Jason actually follows through with shutting it down if it doesn't sell. Remember this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3941626
I'd guess that 37signals does at least 60 million a year in revenue from their main products (100,000 paying customers [1] times at least $50/mo avg). Sortfolio is such a tiny fraction of that, but still requires occasional attention (time + money). I'd shut it down, too. [1] http://entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/jason-fried-scaling-st...
Radically better option than just shutting it down.
The comments on the listing might explain why they haven't gotten any bids. 37Signals seems to be relying on their name to sell Sortfolio as opposed to using best practices for selling sites on flippa. They haven't provided any traffic/revenue proof, responded to questions, or put any visible effort into the sale beyond listing it. Sounds like they aren't too serious about selling it on flippa.com.
I wonder why they are not accepting any Bids, one has been pending for over a day now.
That means they got at least one bid.
"The price is $480,000, cash. No special deals, no partial payments now the rest later, no equity in your company, etc. $480,000 cash and it’s yours."
... "If you’re interested at $480,000, please email me direct at"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3941230
"Sortfolio isn't right for us anymore. Our attention is elsewhere. If we can sell it for a fair price (we consider $480,000 fair), then we'll sell it. If not, we'll close it down and move on."
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3172-sortfolio-going-once-goi...
The flippa auction says $250,000 is the minimum bid.
They weren't even willing to offer a commission to a broker. They wanted $480,000 nothing less.
Intuitively, 37signals was in a very rare position in the market to immediately funnel traffic to this service and it still did not take off into thousands of paying customers and $1M+ of annual revenue.
I don't believe the ask price is fair as much as it is high enough to maintain the 37signals brand and image. A couple hundred K lower, and it is too little for them to bother. I think it might have had takers in the $70k - $120k (basically salvage price) range.
Shutting it down would be the decent thing to do here. I question whether the site makes as much money annually as 37Signals say it does. Why shut down a profitable site that probably in its current form requires hardly any maintenance? Something is fishy here, I don't know what but the whole thing wreaks of suspicion.