I am back from my trip to Ukraine digging through the news I missed while on the move. This interesting bit has just attracted my attention: Trezr, the deals site I reviewed in the past, has sold on eBay for an impressive $30,100.01.
The auction (link) started on July 5 with initial price of $1.00 and gradually attracted bids over the 6 days period (I am sure this coverage at Techcrunch helped to float the price).
Trezr launched in October, 2006 and failed to ride the social revolution other deal sites enjoyed. It sports impressive design and some interesting features (profit sharing and a widget) however fails to implement certain key features a successful deal site must have. I have been following Trezr in my monthly list which it dropped out of in February when its Alexa rank fell above 100K threshold.
According to the auction description the website traffic at the time of sale was mere 4,000 visits and 7,500 pageviews per month and the service had 900 registered users. Other interesting details: Trezr was written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on a dedicated server ($950 a year expense).
4000 visits and 7500 page views a month means average only less than 135 visits and 250 page views a day! One third is organic from search engine. Let us assume that another third is from other referring sites (like reviews in your blog) — that leaves only 45 repeated visitors a day. Hardly a community for $30k!
So you ended up buying just the software, which can be re-created with Pligg $5k fee to a contractor on Rent-A-Coder or Elance. It would be coded in PHP so runs in your $10/month shared hosting account as well :)
Gee. $30k for Trezr. I still can’t believe it. Maybe half goes to TechCrunch for featuring it :)
An experienced programmer in Ukraine earns $1000 a month. If you communicate with programmers directly then 30K is enough to make 2 sites like Trezr. If you use an intermediary then you probably have to pay 25-50% extra.
The only case when someone will want to pay 30K for a site like Trezr is if this is exactly what they want and they want it now (they don’t have the time to wait a few months it takes to design and code the site).
I am sure marketing (read “hype”) Techcrunch creates had certain influence in floating the price but I still think Trezr is worth around 20K at least.
GreedyBargains.com : Bargains Shopping Website for Sale on ebay (link)