Novembro, 30 2006
Quinta-feira

sexyounao.com changed hands
When HOTorNOT first swept onto the scene a few years ago, not many people thought it would amount to anything more than a short-term fad. Even today, not many people recognize that HOTorNOT has a very profitable casual dating service consisting of 500,000 – 600,000 active users. HOTorNOT is making somewhere between $5M - $10M per year in revenue with very little cost since they don’t spend any money on marketing.
in HOTorNOT.com Case Study: Mixing free and premium services

When I stumble upon HOTorNot some 5 years ago, I thought of building a "portuguese" version of the site. So in 2001 I bought the portuguese equivalent... sexyounao.com.
Along this time I saw Terravista come out with it's own version, Clix, etc, and I said countless times, "I really should do this, brazilians dig this kind of stuff" (look at Orkut nowadays), but I never got to it. For starters it's not the kind of site that I really like, then the lack of time, then the distractions, then life got in the way... after all I'm a lazy bastard. A domain name alone doesn't make a site successful, but it sure helps, so I kept on renewing it.

Some weeks ago, I got an email asking if I was going to do anything with itand if I was interested on selling it. I said, "I'm not thinking of selling it, but make me an offer". Some days later we agreed on a small four digits amount.

In the process he (who I only had a name and a Gmail address) said he was from Argentina, and I thought "Hmmm, I wonder if there's a spanish version". As it turns out, there's a sexyono.com and amazingly, according to Alexa (yeh, I now) it kicks HOTorNot's ass, and they only started in 2005. Does this mean they are making more millions ? :-)



Well, I finaly joined the pieces together and found out the buyer was one(?) of the owners of sexyono.com. They probably want to did create a portuguese/brazilian version, of which there are already some clones out there. Ahhh, I should have asked for more... ;-)

Anyway, regarding the whole process, one piece of advice, ignore Sedo. Yes, they are probably the leaders on this type of escrow service, but in my own experience they are sloooow to responde, dumb and with higher fees. Escrow was a breeze, two forms and the buyer was notified, some 7 days later and some codes and the domain changed registrars and another day for the money transfer. Painless... well, the Dollar/Euro rates are a bit painfull this last couple of days. ;-)

30 Novembro 2006 - 13:29   2 Comentário(s)   Technorati links   Linking posts