

Sell HN: Selling our Twitter marketing tool (ask me anything) - jmathai
http://blog.publicitweet.com/2010/01/12/publicitweet-social-marketing-tool-for-sale/

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jmathai
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.

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

~~~
jmathai
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.

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

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adrianwaj
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.

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

~~~
adrianwaj
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.

~~~
jmathai
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.

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paraschopra
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'

~~~
rewind
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.

~~~
adrianwaj
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.

~~~
jmathai
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>.

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ashishk
Looks interesting but has it made money?

~~~
jmathai
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.

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chrischen
Do you take equity?

~~~
jmathai
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.

