Sell HN: Selling our Twitter marketing tool (ask me anything) | Hacker News Reader

Sell HN: Selling our Twitter marketing tool (ask me anything)

blog.publicitweet.com

26 pointsjmathai20 comments

You can view the site here: http://publicitweet.com.

We're selling a newly formed start-up (≈7 mo) in order to focus more on another venture we're involved in. We can disclose information pertaining to the site. We're bootstrapped, so any deals would be as quick and simple as possible.

Unfortunately, we can't focus on both ventures.

Ask me anything.

FYI, I didn't know about flippa but just listed it there for $5,000 :)

http://flippa.com/auctions/82518/PubliciTweet---Online-Twitt...

Hey J. If you wouldn't mind sharing, I'm really curious about what made the direct messaging engine so tricky/special.

Mainly the rate limiting and errors.

Rate limiting: Twitter rate limits these calls but for direct messaging they don't provide any information as to what the overage state is. So, if you get an "over" response you don't know if you should wait an hour or a minute to try again. When sending messages out in high volume you can't just pound their servers, nor would they appreciate that.

Errors: Twitter's API throws a lot of errors. A lot of them aren't even valuable errors (like 404 or 403 but rather 500s). They will also implement things in an ad-hoc manner to deal with issues on their end, for example introducing 302 redirects without much notice.

Old Thread for review of 'Publicitweet' on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856450

Well, I could use this app as the base of something I want to build. So I am looking for some custom development consulting as well. Also, I don't want it to cost the earth - maybe I could buy just a majority stake.

Not available for consulting beyond knowledge transfer. Send an email (support@publicitweet.com).

What language and server stack does the site use? I presume you want it off your servers.

Anyone here looking for some interesting, unique and promising consulting work that stretches well beyond Twitter? Please make contact with me.

I can help get it set up but it uses a standard LAMP stack. Requires Apache, PHP (5.2+) and MySQL (5+). Optionally uses Memcache and falls back to APC.

Not related to your particular offer but I like the way you are approaching the issue of selling your startup so openly. Could trigger a meme: 'Sell HN'

Personally, I think it would suck if people started coming here to dump their companies. I don't think that's why most readers come to the site, so it's just more noise.

I disagree, at least here the people selling conceived and built the site, with some hack element to it. So you expect some degree of quality, and the reasons to sell may be the urge to start something new rather than for pure profit maximization. Flippa, Sitepoint: like looking for a diamond in the rough.

For clarification, this is precisely what we're looking to do. We have a different venture we want to devote all our time to. The only down side to having ideas out the wazzu :).

The venture we're focusing on is http://www.textbookrevolt.com.

Agreed. I think most people know where http://flippa.com/ is

Now I know about it, thanks :)

http://flippa.com/auctions/82518/PubliciTweet---Online-Twitt...

Thanks. Hopefully it could trigger a sale :).

Looks interesting but has it made money?

We haven't added any payment functionality to the site. We have code in a branch that integrates with Amazon's FPS but it hasn't been pushed to the production site.

That was our next logical step and there are actually a lot of opportunities in the product to upsell on features.

Do you take equity?

No. It's just myself and my co-founder and we're interested in selling it outright. We haven't taken any funding and our main goal is to alleviate ourselves from managing the site. It is pretty much on autopilot but we're focusing more on a separate venture and would like to find a good home for the site.

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