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).
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.
Flippa contacted us after we posted Sortfolio for sale on our blog (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3172-sortfolio-going-once-goi...). They asked us to list on Flippa too. So I said, sure, we'll list it on Flippa too. I couldn't include specific information the way I wanted to include it, so I didn't include everything in that listing. I got a few private inquiries, they didn't go anywhere, and they seemed lower quality than the leads we were getting from our blog. So we turned most of our attention to leads generated on our blog since they were of higher quality and better qualified (fielding qualified leads properly is time consuming).
Flippa may not have been a great fit for Sortfolio, or we may not have been a good fit for Flippa. I could have tried harder on Flippa, but I have limited time and when one source generates significantly better leads than another source, you have to make a decision where to spend most of your time.
The people behind Flippa were great - they were helpful and kind. I don't have anything bad to say about the experience. If nothing else, we didn't give it enough of our attention. Lesson learned.
Shucks Jason ... now we're blushing! ;-)
Happy to confirm all this. Great to hear you were able to find a qualified buyer.
Your comments on buyers needing to qualify themselves to get a response is right on. Professional buyers pitch themselves to sellers as much as the other way around.
Did anyone who actually bid on the site take issue?
I'd think that anyone ready to spend $400k on a site would have the willingness to get in direct contact with the seller, and that this "Rise of the White Knights" episode on HN is not based in reality.
This is the most helpful information here. Perhaps the best take-away for everyone is learning what doing something so public without enough attention can easily lead to.
