TechCrunch Acquires InviteShare
Michael Arrington
125 comments »
Getting invitations to private betas can be a frustrating experience for early adopters. If you don’t know someone who’s already in the beta it could end up being a very long wait. Over the last few years invitations for some betas were so hard to get that they ended up for sale on eBay - Gmail is the most famous example but recently Pownce invites were also put up for sale.
About a month ago we had the idea of creating a fairly simple website that could match users who have invites to those that want them. We started building it but before we were ready to launch an identical service, InviteShare, came on the scene (created by Jeff Broderick at EkinDesigns). I liked it, and I wrote about it last week. The site now has about 14,000 registered users and 15,000 invites have been sent out.
After talking things over with Heather (our CEO), we decided it would be bad form to launch a product that served the same purpose as InviteShare without at least trying to acquire or partner with them. We reached out to Jeff to buy the service, but before we began talking to him he put it up for sale. We bid against a few others and acquired the company.
Did we pay more for the service because we had written about? Almost certainly, given how much weight Jeff gave to the TechCrunch post (and all of the press that followed) when describing the service on the sale page.
And I’m ok with that. Jeff created a simple but very useful service that our readers will want to use. He deserves to be rewarded for that creativity and effort.
We’ll be making some stability and minor feature changes to the service over the coming weeks and possibly moving it to a “crunchier” domain name, but for the most part it will remain the same. Try it out if you want a beta invite to one of those hard to get to new services. We have not completed server migration yet, so there may continue to be slow page loads or outages. Everything should be all set by end of day today.
Congrats on your first acquisition
Congrats, Mike & gang!
How much was that $5,000? LMAO!
Well done!
Well done Mike - great set of decisions!
please add groups for easy invitesharing between webpeergroups.
Congratulations Michael .. I expected it the day I saw the post on Inviteshare
Register invitecrunch.com for starters?
Mike not disclosing the price?
I don’t know about a crunch name, inviteshare is a pretty cool name for what it does
Heeey Mike …. 1 question — Has Techcrunch been offered any aquisition queries so far
??? I mean - has anybody so far asked for techcrunch ?? if so - wat amount hav they asked for ??? and wat will be the amount u would sell it for 
??? …… will u answer this question for ur users 
?? …. ( Please dont read this reply and pretend u’ve not read anything - and stay quiet - LOL - 
)
Sorry… just checked SPF and found that the sale price was 25K. thats quite cheap considering its future potential.
Duncan — no probs evn u can answer the above question
// Techcrunch has aquired inviteshare for $ 25000 — “Sold!
Winning Bid: $25,000.00
Congratulations to the winning bidder, who has chosen to remain nameless! “
K.Kaviraj - I most certainly will not answer any of those questions.
congrats!
http://www.nocrunch.com
_everybody’s invited_
how would this be?
Looks like someone beat you guys to InviteCrunch.com. Still, I think it’s best to stick with the existing domain, and if anything, migrate the web design to the network’s style. I think the price was fair for both parties.
uuuwwooooowww ….. Mike — its really cool … I have been a Techcrunch reader for nearly 6 months …and its the first time u hav directly replied to me …… its really a gr8 feeeling yaaaaar
….. am gonna show this to all ma frnds … ( personally am a gr8 fan of u 
) !!!
K.Kaviraj - you need to get out more.
Congrats on the acquisition!
Please don’t ruin that beautiful design by porting it over the TechCrunch network’s ‘design style’
Now you just need to do a review of each site!
Interesting that when a site is sold on eBay it goes into the deadpool, but when a site is sold on Sitepoint it gets acquired…-Metagg
Congratulations on the acquisition of InviteShare.
Do you have any additional features planned for it?
Congratulations on the acquisition!
@Metagg…you have to consider the users. eBay’ers don’t know the value in sites and domains while those on SitePoint really know what’s going on.
Now I have visions of some of the possible new domain names for the new crunchy invite service…invitecrunch, invitesharecrunch…hey Michael you’d better go register some domain names before someone else grabs the good ones or you’ll be buying them, too.
Please don’t change the name!
excellent …. i like the idea that you own it now, makes more sense and mutually beneficial to us (the loyal readers) and the crunch network.
man, you gotta do something about that site’s colors! You can’t read anything at all.
I guess fortuituous for all that the founder decided to sell.
If he hadn’t, would Techcrunch have launched a competitor?
Haha, I was expecting this. Congrats on acquiring such a simple but awesome site.
Wow! Just a few days ago, I was reading a post over at InviteShare that they are up for sale. It’s nice to know TC buying InviteShare. Congrats for winning the bid!
yay…..
I thought the price will go higher up to 50,60. Very cheap acquisition price. The important thing is the user base who are early innovators, the most valuable people in this arena.
A new app. may pay a lot for a certain promotion at that site. So i don’t think TechCrunch will depend on only ads and impressions but a much more profitable revenue model.
Very strategic and promising acquisition.
This is actually TechCrunch’s second acquisition. Remember FuckedCrunch? (formerly fuckedcompany.com).
Except… it’s not April 1st now
K. Kaviraj, if you picked up this month’s Wired issue the article “TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz… and Cash” Wired states the following concerning TechCrunch being acquired, “He says he could have sold the operation last fall to a media company (which he won’t name) for $8.5 million, and he may still.”
That gives you a ballpark answer to your question.
Nice Job to Mike and the gang. Hopefully you guys will be given a lot of invites that you can share with others on the service!
very cool
congrats its a nice fit.
Congrats! But why not announce it right away? Too many bugs?
Congratulations on the acquistion. It looks like a great site.
Best of luck with it!
i love techcrunch, i come daily on this site. it really good move to accuires InviteShare. because now InviteShare will get more audiance under hood of techcrunch
nice charity work…
If TC had come out with their own solution, it would have trumped inviteshare just because of your reach.
Yeah also ValleyWag gives out opinions on TC being acquired - alot too…
I think the 8.5mm is a little too high; probably around 3-5mm.
And I don’t think Mike will sell cause; he is probably making 500k for himself if not more a year right now.
It makes sense in a way: It’s “edgeio for invites” without the automatic page scraping (edgeio as it was originally conceived). Of course I would still argue that it is a centralizing technology and not a de-centralizing technology!
Good move on your part.
I was doing the math for inviteshare figures- They make $6 per day, 500000 page views..that pretty much puts then in a spot for a penny per 27 page views. This won’t even cover the hosting cost. No wonder they sold it out!
So any figures you have for your latest acquisition of inviteshare.com?
Good job i think. You will be the winner after a couple of months…
i hope you add the functionality to send invites using the service, not send confirmations back and forth and you have to use your own email, that sucks!
Been reading your site for over 6 months or so. The buy is a perfect fit in my opinion. cool.
Hey Mike,
I always come to techcrunch because they have numbers for the deals happening around and now with ur own acquisition you don’t provide no numbers. I am sure u have reasons for it but then again doesn’t it DEFEAT the purpose of TechCrunch as a brand??
Sounds like someone woke up and read Valleywag this morning, and decided to do some damage control
http://valleywag.com/tech/acquisitions/-280083.php
Come on, this can’t be the exception, you people always talk about money, tell us how much you pay for that one
A better description is the source of the valleywag story
http://www.techomical.com/my_w.....-acqu.html
“But then there is the ethical considerations.”
indeed!
Just wanted to say - nice move, think it fits into your ethos/mission really well. (As you already know!)
Congratulations on the acquisition.
Justin, the news was out in the TC Forums before ‘valleyway’ posted (which is prob where they got it from anyway)
http://forums.techcrunch.com/f.....6149#16149
congrats Mike!
Congrats on this synergistic acquisition!
I registered at the site when you first mentioned it on TechCrunch. It’s a smart offering.
Congrats, nice acquisition, makes sense with your site reporting about the new web companies.
Congratulation! Hopefully that will make InviteShare more useful and stable!
sojo - yeah, I think its kind of funny that the moderators figured it out on our forums before anyone else.
So - there is one issue with TechCrunch owning Invite Share.
As a startup company, you don’t always want your private beta becoming a semi-pubic beta. Once invites get onto this site they start getting distributed everywhere without your control. Imagine if you were trying to target a specific geographic region…
On the other hand, you want to give TechCrunch access to your private beta, because they hold the keys to instant publicity.
So will companies in beta now have a reason to hesitate to give TC access, in fear that the invites will end up on Invite Share?
Just a thought. =^)
Congrats on the acquisition. It is a very useful site.
Congratulations. Invite Share sure sounds like a great idea. What’s next?
Pownce invitations for sale? I was thinking of paying people to take them away from me! Seriously, give me a link and I will link to you as well as GIVE you a Pownce invite http://www.shawnblog.com/post/4866491
Congrats Mike, a very good move indeed. I am sure it’s not just about Invite Share. If you think about the core code they have to rank users and bring about more popular users to the top than others can be used as is to increase the popularity of techcrunch in ‘certian ways’. Now did I say that out loud. Perhaps Digg’s threading system on comments, with this kind of logic could increase the number of comments on your site !!
I guess in all ways, this acquisition makes a lot of sense
Kaviraj, Mike is right, you do need to get out more, but to answer your question Mike in the past has said he has been offered $8.5 million for his business. Likely to be all sites, perhaps Mike will confirm.
Chris @ http://www.frostfirebuzz.com - Internet business news
So a $10k cost (seems high considering the long odds all or nothing bet) values each of the 14,000 registered user at, er, 71 cents.
Sounds like a good valuation metric to apply to all these startups
Very nice indeed!
Was hoping you’d scoop them up after they put the site up for sale. Beta invitation sharing is a great service for techcrunch to offer to its readers. Congrats!
Might I suggest adding links about the availability of invitations to the services when you write about them.
I think the whole invite thing is ok, but if what you’re after is a really good beta test then I think there should be more of an application. This way you will get decent beta testers willing to actually provide feedback. If you’re purely looking for load testing this is a crappy way of doing it. How many people are going to sign up for these sites through InviteShare and just bail after 10 minutes.
Kudos, but make a conscious effort to keep conflict of interest issues to a minimum; you’ve already been accused of conflict of interest issues, and I can see it happening if InviteShare isn’t fully transparent.
This post has the highest ever positive/negative comment ratio I have seen on TC recently
@Tim: Those same questions have been asked and will be addressed in the future
Error 500 - Internal server error
couldn’t get in las time you wrote about it.. are there problems? I have invites to share
Error 500 - Internal server error
An internal server error has occured!
Please try again later.
I just signed up for Inviteshare and I have a suggestion. It would be helpful to have a quick description next to each logo. Most of these names (wallop, orgoo, etc) dont explain what they do.
Congratulations Michael, What’s the next move. Will you like to buy mediarati.com?
Nicely done on the acquire, Mike and co.
Don’t get me started with Sitepoint, I had the worst experience recently selling a site using their Marketplace.
congrats mike , you behave with uprightness !
best
marc
It makes complete sense. Anyhow there are way too many people who hang out at TC to get invites. I was expecting mashable to acquire them.
please create a feature that allows for easy copying of a requested email address. i’ve been trying to unload my pownce and joost invites and it’s difficult to sent invites when i have to constantly switch back and forth to spellcheck drknockers07@slimgoodbody.com to make sure the invite reaches its intended recipient. i understand the design is to curb spammers, but there has got to be a way to make it easy to copy and paste the email address securely.
You got so much traffic heading over there I get nothing but server errors trying to sign up. I guess that’s good. I’ll try again later.
Just for irony - shouldn’t you send out invites to be the first to use the new TechCrunchified InviteShare?
Best acquisition you’ve made since fuckedcompany.com
Great idea Mike! I just joined, but I am getting a bunch of server errors every so often. Glad to see it’s popular. I’ve been a reader for almost a year, but this is my first post. Decided it was time to add another female voice to the fray.
Mike, can I interest you in considering crunchvite.com? starting bid: $26,000. cash only, kthx.
nice acquisition, I can see that this service can be benefitial for techcrunch readers..
but still somewhat overpriced imho for something you can make in 1-2 days..
Just curious - did you cover the fact that it was for sale while the auction was running?
I think it was sold for $25k, decent price, the owner certainly got a good deal for a site just weeks old.
dude, you did NOT overpay - no way - that service is slick, and in the CA area or around, you’d be paying (likely) right around that price to build a comparable service on your own, with delay - so for a slight premium, you have it NOW as do all of your loyal readers
1 - Write about a startup in Techcrunch
2 - Acquire that startup
3 - ???
4 - Profit !!!
congrats! i signed up last week after seeing it on usa today’s popcandy.
i love the idea. now i just have to wait until i get an invite to that oink! torrent site in 40 years.
i think the site has potential. there is buzz about it already and you cant put a number on that so i think the price was fine. lets see what you can do with it to capitalize!
Not bad for a few weeks of work. . .
so you need an ex-myspace exec as CEO to “aquire” a $5 ohhh sory $30/day site!
Well done Michael, the crunch empire is building up slowly but surely
Good for you guys! I love InviteShare, and I think TechCrunch running it just makes sense. Can we look forward to some sort of integration between the two sites?
Can’t wait to stop seeing that ‘500 internal error’
I notice the site is down for maintenance, however I have a new ‘killer’ service which will combine heatmap, clickmap and adsense tracking tool (expanding to other forms of ads i.e., auctionads, yahoo pub, etc) for your website/blog.
It will be rendered with ajax and a few more tweaks to make it appealing. The best thing about it is that it will always remain 100% free. So along with the 2 developers and CSS develop we are pouring our heart and soul into it.
I foresee another 4 weeks prior to Beta release.
Mike, can you enlighten me on what the procedure would be to offer these Beta invites on the site. I will probably take the route of pownce and offer limited invites per user, the important factor is the server to power the service especially if big sites intend to use the service; definitely will need to put a restriction to have a fully functioning site.
Invite Share is a nice startup, But i have a question regarding your acquisition: will it continue to spam? Today i found Mcafee SiteAdvisor’s Logo turning Yellow: here is what it says: http://www.siteadvisor.com/sit.....p;aff_id=0
hope it will not be included in the business model or else we will see TechCrunch with mouth shut about spam!
Congrats Michael.
Great choice. Fast decision.
=Argo Wibowo
c’mon mike…disclose the acquisition price
If anyone read the sitepoint marketplace listing that Mike linked to, which clearly no one did, it’s set at a private bid acceptance of $25k hidden behind a private bid, so that is at least what Mike’s company paid for it.
“we decided it would be bad form to launch a product that served the same purpose as InviteShare without at least trying to acquire or partner with them.”
Nice business ethics.
Congrats, Mike and the rest of TC! Well played.
Mike, can u break ur own news? How much did u buy over InviteShare?
Well done Mike and good to see you putting something back into the community you ultimately serve. A great gesture.
Michael, maybe a crunchy name could be:
http://www.invitopia.com
It is getting pretty crowded there !
Great Purchase, you be up with those guys I mention on my last post before you know it……
I may have some funky grammar from time to time but I hope I don’t sound like a retard.
CrunchInvites.com up for sale too if you guys are interested.
I came up with this idea months ago, I had a succesfull website running, but the hosting company I was with went down and I lost everything. I can’t believe this has just been sold for that much. I’m a poor student and that would have been brilliant.