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July 19, 2007

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.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 5:04 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Rookie

    July 19th, 2007 at 4:44 am

    Congrats on your first acquisition

  2. Smaran

    July 19th, 2007 at 4:47 am

    Congrats, Mike & gang!

  3. homer

    July 19th, 2007 at 4:58 am

    How much was that $5,000? LMAO!

  4. AxelF

    July 19th, 2007 at 4:59 am

    Well done!

  5. Chris Saad

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:00 am

    Well done Mike - great set of decisions!

  6. marcel weiss

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:00 am

    please add groups for easy invitesharing between webpeergroups.

  7. Pooran

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:01 am

    Congratulations Michael .. I expected it the day I saw the post on Inviteshare :)

  8. Robin Wauters

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:01 am

    Register invitecrunch.com for starters?

  9. Internet Evangelist

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:06 am

    Mike not disclosing the price?

  10. Duncan Riley

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:06 am

    I don’t know about a crunch name, inviteshare is a pretty cool name for what it does :-)

  11. K.Kaviraj

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:07 am

    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 - ;-) )

  12. Internet Evangelist

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:08 am

    Sorry… just checked SPF and found that the sale price was 25K. thats quite cheap considering its future potential.

  13. K.Kaviraj

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:10 am

    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! “

  14. Michael Arrington

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:10 am

    K.Kaviraj - I most certainly will not answer any of those questions. :-)

  15. compuneo

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:14 am

    congrats!

    http://www.nocrunch.com
    _everybody’s invited_

    how would this be?

  16. Luke

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:15 am

    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.

  17. K.Kaviraj

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:19 am

    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 ;-) ) !!!

  18. Michael Arrington

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:19 am

    K.Kaviraj - you need to get out more. :-)

  19. Allen Stern

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:20 am

    Congrats on the acquisition!

  20. Jay

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:32 am

    Please don’t ruin that beautiful design by porting it over the TechCrunch network’s ‘design style’

  21. Mark Trefgarne

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:34 am

    Now you just need to do a review of each site!

  22. Metagg

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:35 am

    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

  23. Michael Morgan

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:40 am

    Congratulations on the acquisition of InviteShare.

    Do you have any additional features planned for it?

  24. Bill Hartzer

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:44 am

    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. ;)

  25. Michael Camilleri

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:46 am

    Please don’t change the name!

  26. Jankik

    July 19th, 2007 at 5:55 am

    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.

  27. add

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:13 am

    man, you gotta do something about that site’s colors! You can’t read anything at all.

  28. Matt

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:16 am

    I guess fortuituous for all that the founder decided to sell.

    If he hadn’t, would Techcrunch have launched a competitor?

  29. Mike

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:16 am

    Haha, I was expecting this. Congrats on acquiring such a simple but awesome site.

  30. Avinash

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:18 am

    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!

  31. abbu

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:20 am

    yay…..

  32. Tekin Tatar

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:23 am

    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.

  33. Zoli Erdos

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:28 am

    This is actually TechCrunch’s second acquisition. Remember FuckedCrunch? (formerly fuckedcompany.com).

    Except… it’s not April 1st now :-)

  34. Christian Arca

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:37 am

    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.

  35. Ryan Wagner

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:39 am

    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!

  36. Jesse

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:40 am

    very cool

  37. Darren Stuart

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:42 am

    congrats its a nice fit.

  38. Soso Sazesh

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:47 am

    Congrats! But why not announce it right away? Too many bugs?

  39. KindAndThoughtful

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:56 am

    Congratulations on the acquistion. It looks like a great site.

    Best of luck with it!

  40. faizan ahmad khan

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:59 am

    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

  41. beng

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:07 am

    nice charity work…

    If TC had come out with their own solution, it would have trumped inviteshare just because of your reach.

  42. Rb

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:10 am

    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.

  43. scott

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:13 am

    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.

  44. Thinker

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:17 am

    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?

  45. petnos

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:20 am

    Good job i think. You will be the winner after a couple of months…

  46. Ryan

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:21 am

    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!

  47. anantara

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:23 am

    Been reading your site for over 6 months or so. The buy is a perfect fit in my opinion. cool.

  48. Entrepreneur

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:24 am

    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??

  49. Justin

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:25 am

    Sounds like someone woke up and read Valleywag this morning, and decided to do some damage control

    http://valleywag.com/tech/acquisitions/-280083.php

  50. Today Is Not Over Yet

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:28 am

    Come on, this can’t be the exception, you people always talk about money, tell us how much you pay for that one

  51. Justin

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:29 am

    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!

  52. Geoff Wright

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:29 am

    Just wanted to say - nice move, think it fits into your ethos/mission really well. (As you already know!)

  53. ThuVien

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:33 am

    Congratulations on the acquisition.

  54. sojo

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:35 am

    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!

  55. Mark Frisk

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:36 am

    Congrats on this synergistic acquisition!

    I registered at the site when you first mentioned it on TechCrunch. It’s a smart offering.

  56. Chris

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:37 am

    Congrats, nice acquisition, makes sense with your site reporting about the new web companies.

  57. Yusuf Motiwala

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:39 am

    Congratulation! Hopefully that will make InviteShare more useful and stable!

  58. Michael Arrington

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:41 am

    sojo - yeah, I think its kind of funny that the moderators figured it out on our forums before anyone else.

  59. Tim

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:44 am

    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.

  60. Andrew Pass

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:49 am

    Congratulations. Invite Share sure sounds like a great idea. What’s next?

  61. Shawn Honnick

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:50 am

    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

  62. Saagar

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:56 am

    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 :)

  63. Frostfirebuzz.com

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:00 am

    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

  64. Justin

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:13 am

    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 :)

  65. Viet

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:19 am

    Very nice indeed!

  66. Spike

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:34 am

    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.

  67. Brian

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:37 am

    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.

  68. David Scott Lewis

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:40 am

    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.

  69. Nik Cubrilovic

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:41 am

    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

  70. jill

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:48 am

    Error 500 - Internal server error

  71. tapster

    July 19th, 2007 at 8:49 am

    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.

  72. lofi

    July 19th, 2007 at 9:12 am

    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.

  73. victor

    July 19th, 2007 at 9:28 am

    Congratulations Michael, What’s the next move. Will you like to buy mediarati.com?

  74. Don Wilson

    July 19th, 2007 at 9:29 am

    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.

  75. marc - godandweb20.com

    July 19th, 2007 at 9:43 am

    congrats mike , you behave with uprightness !
    best
    marc

  76. Krish

    July 19th, 2007 at 9:48 am

    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.

  77. kdm2

    July 19th, 2007 at 10:00 am

    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.

  78. Durk Price

    July 19th, 2007 at 10:14 am

    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.

  79. Matt R

    July 19th, 2007 at 10:18 am

    Just for irony - shouldn’t you send out invites to be the first to use the new TechCrunchified InviteShare?

  80. WTF

    July 19th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    Best acquisition you’ve made since fuckedcompany.com ;-)

  81. Marjorie

    July 19th, 2007 at 10:24 am

    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.

  82. mehrshad

    July 19th, 2007 at 10:30 am

    Mike, can I interest you in considering crunchvite.com? starting bid: $26,000. cash only, kthx.

  83. Jayme

    July 19th, 2007 at 10:43 am

    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..

  84. Greg

    July 19th, 2007 at 10:56 am

    Just curious - did you cover the fact that it was for sale while the auction was running?

  85. Jono

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:05 am

    I think it was sold for $25k, decent price, the owner certainly got a good deal for a site just weeks old.

  86. dave

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:05 am

    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 ;)

  87. WTF

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:07 am

    1 - Write about a startup in Techcrunch
    2 - Acquire that startup
    3 - ???
    4 - Profit !!!

  88. Ru

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    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.

  89. Ru

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:12 am

    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!

  90. Browse

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:16 am

    Not bad for a few weeks of work. . .

  91. Greg

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:17 am

    so you need an ex-myspace exec as CEO to “aquire” a $5 ohhh sory $30/day site!

  92. Alex

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:43 am

    Well done Michael, the crunch empire is building up slowly but surely :)

  93. Tyrun

    July 19th, 2007 at 11:44 am

    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’ :)

  94. Azzam Sheikh

    July 19th, 2007 at 12:21 pm

    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.

  95. weblockr

    July 19th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

    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! :)

  96. Argo Wibowo

    July 19th, 2007 at 3:21 pm

    Congrats Michael.

    Great choice. Fast decision.

    =Argo Wibowo

  97. lawrence

    July 19th, 2007 at 4:10 pm

    c’mon mike…disclose the acquisition price

  98. Don Wilson

    July 19th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    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.

  99. Adrian

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

    “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.

  100. Cortland Coleman

    July 19th, 2007 at 6:34 pm

    Congrats, Mike and the rest of TC! Well played.

  101. fistball

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:08 pm

    Mike, can u break ur own news? How much did u buy over InviteShare?

  102. Dennis Howlett

    July 19th, 2007 at 7:26 pm

    Well done Mike and good to see you putting something back into the community you ultimately serve. A great gesture.

  103. Krikor Ohannessian

    July 20th, 2007 at 12:49 am

    Michael, maybe a crunchy name could be:

    http://www.invitopia.com

    It is getting pretty crowded there !

  104. Jeff Nolan

    July 20th, 2007 at 6:27 pm

    Great Purchase, you be up with those guys I mention on my last post before you know it……

  105. The Real Jeff Nolan

    July 20th, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    I may have some funky grammar from time to time but I hope I don’t sound like a retard.

  106. Anton

    July 21st, 2007 at 11:12 am

    CrunchInvites.com up for sale too if you guys are interested.

  107. Jon

    July 26th, 2007 at 4:40 am

    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.

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