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Sortfolio lives

37signals.com

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Re: Sortfolio lives

#31

Post by jasonfried »

shazow wrote: post #24
jasonfried wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, I responded to select private Flippa messages from buyers I considered to be qualified. If someone was serious about spending $480,000, they should have gotten in touch privately and demonstrated that they were serious, qualified buyers. Everyone had an equal chance to buy Sortfolio - one party stepped up and got it done.

I'm glad to hear about your attentive private responses. HN has this culture of entrepreneurial voyeurism. When a unique scenario like Sortfolio gets posted, we like to watch how it unfolds and learn from the process. When dozens of interesting questions piled on without any response from you guys, I was disappointed. Clearly you're well within your rights to do what you did, but I hope this sheds some light on some…

We were quite open about the whole thing. We posted revenues, the deadline, the selling price, etc. Here was the post where we announced the sale on our blog: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3172-sortfolio-going-once-goi...

A number of serious buyers got in touch, asked a variety of different questions, and we got them direct answers.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#32

Post by gr366 »

I don't know if they ended up being the acquiring party, but one of the people seriously considering the purchase reached out privately to my company (a Sortfolio customer), with a few short questions. It was a polite email that made it clear they were looking for opportunities to improve the service (as well as address the original concerns about credit card info not carrying over), so I was happy to provide my feedback. I'm happy Sortfolio has been acquired and plan to stick with the service.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#33

Post by jasonfried »

larrys wrote: post #25
jasonfried wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who was a qualified buyer, and asked privately, got the answer. Lots of people asked privately. We even put serious buyers in touch with our credit card processing company so they could get additional questions answered directly.

"Anyone who was a qualified buyer" What criteria did you use to determine a "qualified" buyer? As someone who frequently deals in transactions over the web for large dollar amounts it is not always clear who is qualified and who isn't. Especially if you aren't doing a high volume of transactions so you don't have a pattern established. One recent transaction we handled for someone started off with an insulting offer…

When you get dozens and dozens and dozens of inquiries, it's pretty easy to tell which ones are serious. People who are prepared to spend $480,000 make it very clear they they're interested in moving forward and not just browsing.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#34

Post by dhh »

richardv wrote: post #20
dhh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another wild theory: The buyers contacted us directly, got the answers to the questions they sought, and closed the deal. Also, this is not out of the blue. We lost interest in considering all sorts of complicated deals a while back. So we told everyone that the price was $480K and that the deadline for closing a deal was July 1st: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3172-sortfolio-going-once-goi... So there was re…

Why are you always so bitter to people asking straight questions? If you didn't want people to draw their own conclusions then you should have acted responsibly and made some attempt to answer and respond to the questions posted on sale page. If you had no intention of providing this additional information because it was not worth your time, then you should have made it clear to people that no additional information…

Bitter? No. Offended? Sure. We share everything that's going on with the sale. Multiple write-ups. And yet still the default HN hive-mind behavior is to jump to a conspiracy theory!? Come on.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#35

Post by dhh »

larrys wrote: post #14
dhh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you got us figured out. We had an offer, sat on it, invented this story to see if we could get more, and played the world for a fool. BUT YOU BUSTED US. OH NOOOOES! Or, of course, the simpler explanation: We thought the site was worth at least 2x the previous year's take. And if we didn't get that, it wasn't worth our time to deal with the transaction.

I have no idea what I said to get a response like that. There is nothing wrong with what I proposed as a reason and it certainly doesn't rise to the level of "played the world for a fool." in any way. "We thought the site was worth at least 2x the previous year's take. And if we didn't get that, it wasn't worth our time to deal with the transaction." "it wasn't worth our time to deal with the transaction." Your attit…

You have no idea? You launched wild accusations that we were just playing everyone with our proposal and that we actually just had a buyer all along. If we had a buyer at $480K, we would not have bothered listing it again. We would just have sold it.

I think the only reason why you consider my attitude an outlier is because I state it. Every business have a cut off point where a potential return is not worth the hassle. $480K was that number for us. I'll guarantee you that it's much, much higher for most other businesses.

Do you think Apple is going to fiddle through $200K purchase negotiations if they want to diverse themselves of a product? Of course not. Just not worth their time.

I'm happy how things have worked out for me so far, but thanks for caring.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#36

Post by moe »

jasonfried wrote: post #30
moe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count me in on that theory (another member from the peanut gallery!). The whole story just sounded so contrived from the start and didn't play out much better. I mean, we know 37signals and reality are not best friends, but just throwing away 220k/yr in nearly passive income if it doesn't sell for the desired price, seemed a little far out there to begin with... With that kind of money at stake I'd have expected at l…

So you know the truth, we didn't have a buyer from the start. We didn't know if anyone would buy it. We'd never met or heard of the eventual buyers. We tried to sell Sortfolio a year earlier and nothing came through. We decided to try again this time with a deadline and a public price. This deal materialized because the buyers were interested in what we were selling, we liked their enthusiasm for the product, and we…

Sorry, I still have trouble believing you. Partly because I don't believe the premise of just not giving a shit about $220k in passive income.

And partly because this all snaps together way too snug. Short of the fortuitous hero riding into the sunset as the exit-credits scroll by. On his Louis Vuitton designer-pony.

But it doesn't matter what I believe. You're the guys with the sportscars.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#37

Post by dangrossman »

dhh wrote: post #34
richardv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you always so bitter to people asking straight questions? If you didn't want people to draw their own conclusions then you should have acted responsibly and made some attempt to answer and respond to the questions posted on sale page. If you had no intention of providing this additional information because it was not worth your time, then you should have made it clear to people that no additional information…

Bitter? No. Offended? Sure. We share everything that's going on with the sale. Multiple write-ups. And yet still the default HN hive-mind behavior is to jump to a conspiracy theory!? Come on.

You didn't really share anything someone would need to valuate the site publicly. You (well, Jason) posted an auction with no information about costs or profit, traffic sources or subscriber turnover, handover or whether the billing info of the customers would transfer, etc. These are the most basic pieces of information you'd expect to see in any listing of a site for sale there. Nobody responded to questions on the listing, and nobody accepted any of the pending bids (and people did try to bid on that auction).

https://flippa.com/2739829-sortfolio-com-web-design-marketpl...

What was the point of a public auction if you were only going to answer questions to private bidders contacting you directly? And why list it at all when you were trying to sell outside Flippa, in violation of their listing terms? Assuming that you were acting in bad faith, abusing Flippa as a mere marketing tool for a private sale, would be uncharacteristic for 37S.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#38

Post by tptacek »

moe wrote: post #36
jasonfried wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you know the truth, we didn't have a buyer from the start. We didn't know if anyone would buy it. We'd never met or heard of the eventual buyers. We tried to sell Sortfolio a year earlier and nothing came through. We decided to try again this time with a deadline and a public price. This deal materialized because the buyers were interested in what we were selling, we liked their enthusiasm for the product, and we…

Sorry, I still have trouble believing you. Partly because I don't believe the premise of just not giving a shit about $220k in passive income. And partly because this all snaps together way too snug. Short of the fortuitous hero riding into the sunset as the exit-credits scroll by. On his Louis Vuitton designer-pony. But it doesn't matter what I believe. You're the guys with the sportscars.

At grave risk of sounding even more patronizing than I usually do, let me try to help you with something:

HN people spend a lot of time arguing with each other, often about nonsense or trivia (hey, myself included). In those arguments, it is very normal to say "I have trouble believing X is true" or "I have a hard time believing Y". And while it's not the most polite way to express disagreement, it's more annoying than rude. (It is in fact a cardinal example of what my spouse Erin would say makes disagreeing with me annoying).

It is on the other hand incredibly rude to respond to someone who just made a categorical statement about something material ("We did not have a buyer from the beginning of the sale of Sortfolio", for instance) with the words "I have trouble believing you". Unbelievably rude. I think it might even be more rude than directly saying "I think you're a liar", since it's so recklessly casual.

Noticing this, I quickly searched over my old comments, horrified that I might have made the same error, perhaps even repeatedly. It is the kind of obnoxiousness to which I am prone. I am very relieved that I was not quickly able to come up with a comment here where I casually called someone else a liar.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#39

Post by tptacek »

citricsquid wrote: post #21
jasonfried wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who was a qualified buyer, and asked privately, got the answer. Lots of people asked privately. We even put serious buyers in touch with our credit card processing company so they could get additional questions answered directly.

The comment implied that the average HN user doesn't have the capacity to understand how business works, but the information the buyers had is not what the public had, that's a bit... disingenuous.

The average HN user certainly doesn't have that capacity. Come on.

Re: Sortfolio lives

#40

Post by ascendant »

ascendant wrote: post #29
larrys wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what I said to get a response like that. There is nothing wrong with what I proposed as a reason and it certainly doesn't rise to the level of "played the world for a fool." in any way. "We thought the site was worth at least 2x the previous year's take. And if we didn't get that, it wasn't worth our time to deal with the transaction." "it wasn't worth our time to deal with the transaction." Your attit…

He's a multi-millionaire and was able to do it while acting this way. Therefore his previous experience is that acting like that will continue making him exceedingly wealthy. Getting angry about it won't do any good, you might as well just ignore him. I'm trying to say this in the most neutral, scientific way possible.

Also note, he has a pretty well established disdain for the entire VC-funded startup model, and Hacker News in general. If you expect him to be polite here, I think you have some misplaced expectations. Not that I'm excusing it, just not losing any sleep over it.
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