Sortfolio auction only has 24 hours left with 0 Bids | Hacker News Reader

Sortfolio auction only has 24 hours left with 0 Bids

flippa.com

23 pointsDanBlake21 comments

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.

I think this is spot on: the payment system issue is huge.

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.

Or selling it in general. Given the terms surrounding the sale $250k is an insanely high asking price.

From the comments:

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.

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...

At this point, with no clear buyers lining up, I'd have held an interview or some other more efficient process, and handed it over to an impressive entrepreneur, while keeping 25% to 40% of the company (give the entrepreneur the majority equity). Set up whatever fair protections are reasonable, and let the entrepreneur run with it, no money down. Then all but forget it exists.

Radically better option than just shutting it down.

Radically better option and dumb not to consider. There are scores of people who could turn this into a much more profitable venture. I mean hell a little toutapp email marketing, cold-calling, seo & ppc - could turn this into a decent business. But anyone would be dumb to take it sans 37signal branding.

Why would anyone seriously considering buying the site bid earlier than necessary? If somebody wants it, buying it at close is when you'd place your bid.

You'd probably have more luck making a return on your investment by purchasing Facebook stock instead of buying Sortfolio. The whole site relies on the 37Signals payment integration and name, if someone buys this I feel sorry for them, because they won't ever see a dime of that money made back after you factor in the cost of running the site infrastructure and time spent integrating the sites payment system with something like Paypal who will take commission from each sale.

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.

I've tried to use Flippa before and I still don't understand the bidding process. If as a seller you don't act on a bid, it auto-expires after something like 5 days. To me it sounded like accepting a bid meant that was the end of the auction, but maybe it was just confirming the bid as an actual bid, which seems unnecessary. Either way, anything I tried to sell always had 0 bids, even though people were bidding on the sites.

It allows you to avoid having people push up the price of your auction with false bids. For higher value sites it gives you a chance to confirm the buyer is able to pay.

I just went into my account and checked... If you don't accept a bid, it automatically rejects it after 72 hours. What is the point of accepting a bid below your reserve price or expiring bids after 72 hours on a 30 day auction? Lots of messages from users wanting to know why I "rejected" their bids and I didn't know what to tell them. I understand measures to prevent artificial price inflation, but anytime bids started becoming competitive, they would start to expire.

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.

Agreed. One thing I found on eBay was to always start with a low price. Quite often $1. People get involved that otherwise wouldn't. It normally ends up with a much higher ending price than normal, because many people are bidding, not just 1-2

No wonder. I would not pay (or advise anyone to pay) half a mil for a business with # of customers in the low hundreds, some of whom have anecdotally confessed to very low efficacy/value from it in previous HN threads.

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.

This would have been a lot more successful if they privately shopped it around and had a plan to make the payments change seamless. If I am paying this site currently I would be uneasy about the way it is possibly changing hands.

Also a lot of people paying for it may have been attracted by the 37 signals brand.

Well now what changed? They made it very clear in both the post and on HN that if they didn't get $480,000 they would close it down (very arrogantly I might add):

"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.

more like floppa.com

Sometimes the best comments are at the bottom. Nice one. ;)

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