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.
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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