
Clutterme.com eBay auction ends below reserve price - soundsop
http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=170280037599?
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patio11
Labors of love with unproven revenue rarely get valued by the market as high
as founders think they should be valued.

a) They've been taking money for less than two full months, after a year of
playing the things-on-Internet-should-be-free game.

b) They sold $4,000 worth of domain names at a cost of $2,000 for themselves
in October.

c) They describe the business as being on a "growth curve", which is an
interesting induction from one data point. I would be worried about whether
you've shaken out all of the freebie customers who were dying for domains,
causing the sales to crater the next month.

d) Cost to duplicate the site is not high. Barriers to entry in the market are
zero. The site has no defensible competitive advantage, certainly not one
which will survive the founders departing.

e) Whoever acquires it will need to find themselves a Rails specialist and
they're not cheap at the moment.

And for that they wanted greater than $40,000.

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aaroneous
I think anything over $40k is a great price for their product. The bubble is
over, and a giant valuation for something that could easily be re-created in a
few weeks just isn't going to happen right now.

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vaksel
not surprising based on what the thing looks like...if I were those guys I'd
spend a few days to come out with an updated design at least for the front
page...also I'd come up with a few designs myself that actually look good for
the samples...the current designs in "Samples" look worse than what you can do
with myspace

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rms
That was dumb to do a reserve price... you should have just set the minimum
bid at whatever your reserve was.

Relist it! :)

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sh1mmer
Ryan Carson talked a lot about how selling in the open wasn't good for him
with Dropsend ([http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/sell-your-
web-a...](http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/sell-your-web-app-
lessons-i-learned-from-selling-dropsend)).

I would think this applies to them too.

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SingAlong
And they also have a patent for sale! And all goes below the reserve price. As
vaskel said, they surely need a new design. Especially the intro on the left
of the homepage looks cluttered

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rms
Provisional patent, at least in software, is only worth it for telling
investors "we have a provisional patent." If it's a lawyer written provisional
patent it may be worth more if it can be refiled as a regular patent with
minimum work, but anyone can have a provisional patent for $125.

