Description
It is with great hesitation that I am doing this, but Twitturly is for sale. Twitturly is a site that tracks links posted to Twitter and orders them based off of the number of times that the URL was tweeted in the last 24 hours. Think Digg, but for Twitter.
http://twitturly.com
Twitturly has received a lot of praise since it launched in April, 2008. It has been written about on TechCrunch (twice), Mashable, and hundreds of other sites. It is in many cases considered "the" twitter URL tracking service.
Visitor Usage / Stats
Each day, on average around 1,000 unique visitors use Twitturly. This is down from our six month average due to lack of attention to the site. The team and I have almost entirely changed focus onto another project, and Twitturly has stagnated because of it. A good home with a developer that is able to dedicate all of their time to it will likely see this site return to its 5k+ average that it was once seeing.
According to FeedBurner, there are around 3,989 Active RSS Feed Subscribers. There are many more than that, but FeedBurner only shows the number of "Active" subscribers, meaning they checked the feed in the last 24 hours.
Twitturly is a PR6 site and has an Alexa Rank of 40,106 (November 7th, 2009).
Income
I have never tried to monetize this site, so it has yet to make any income. I am hoping that potential buyers will see the future that this site has laid out for it and bid according to that. This site will become very popular and very profitable in the future if it is in the right hands.
Processing/Hardware Requirements
Twitturly performs quite a bit of processing on the back end. Each day, we parse over two million tweets that have URLs in them (and rising rapidly). About 50% of those are new links and require our spider to go to the tweeted URL and gather information about it.
Because of the amount of processing, Twitturly uses Amazon EC2. We currently have 7 m1.large servers that are being used for databases, 1 c1.medium being used as our web server, 1 m1.small as our queue server, and 7 c1.medium servers as our update servers. Using EC2 costs us around $3k per month, and I'd HIGHLY recommend using dedicated servers instead. Running dedicated servers of equal specs would allow you to reduce the number of servers needed, probably cutting the count in half. EC2 has a low IO, so for the databaases, they arebarely being used, but are limited by the IO of the disks.
The update servers are designed to be scaled up and down as needed. You can even use a combination of both, servers located locally, and use Amazon when needed for additional capacity.
This sale does not include the transfer of the Amazon account, as most of it is simultaneously used by my other businesses. I will however, perform all of the software installation and configuration required to get the site up and running on your servers, whether you use EC2 or not.
Day-to-day requirements
This site runs almost entirely on its own, and unlike others, I really mean it. I actually browse the site looking for cool links more often than I am able to work on it lately.
The only time you are "required" to do anything is if you see any performance issues, you would need to address them, usually by adding additional capacity temporarily. This rarely happens - maybe once every two weeks (usually there is a corresponding event on Twitter that everyone is talking about, like a big product launch, or earthquake, etc that causes this).
Unique Abilities
I will not go into full detail here, but there are many unique things that I have coded into the site to make it run efficiently.
I have built in an excellent pre-caching system so that the site can load quickly and without much work. It is able to support massive amounts of users because the homepage is basically static content.
There is also a custom built spam filtering system to help get rid of all of the spam links tweeted on Twitters public time line.
The most unique asset that comes with this site, that no one else has, is all of the tweets with links for all public accounts on twitter since April, 2008. None of our competitors have this data, and having it allows for some very interesting things to be done with the data.
Partnerships
Twitturly gets its tweets from a partnership with Summize, before they were bought by Twitter and turned into http://search.twitter.com. Even though Summize is now owned by twitter, Twitturly still has an agreement to access their search API as often as needed. We also have an additional agreement with Twitter that lets us use their main API nearly without limitations.
Our partners that we are providing data to include, Alltop, Buzzfeed, Kosmix, Twee, and Twitterville. We also have 5 others that we've partnered with, but they have not yet rolled out any features using Twitturly.
Future Features
I will not list them all here because I'd imagine the buyer would like them to remain private until they are released, but I will say that I have some things in development that I believe will explode the user base, likely into the tens of thousands of users per day. I am willing to elaborate on some of the smaller ones via private message. The buyer will get all ideas that I have to make Twitturly even more popular, both big and small.
Future Outlook
While I cannot guarantee it, because you can't guarantee the future, I can say that Twitturly's outlook looks very good, as long as it's in the right hands. As Twitter breaks more and more into the mainstream, so will Twitturly.
Competitors
There are a few competitors in this space, but all of them approach things differently, and I feel they contain flaws in their methodology. To reiterate above, none of our competitors store all of the data forever. They all delete it after a certain period. Because we have it, we can do some very interesting things (I can elaborate on this more to interested parties).
Why am I selling it?
I am selling Twitturly for three reasons, the first is time. I run another business full time as well as work as a consultant practically full time. I just don't have the time to build out the new features that I think Twitturly should have, and me not working on Twitturly on daily basis is hindering its growth.
The second reason is money. I have put a lot of money into Twitturly (mainly in the server infrastructure), and I cannot put more into it, or take time away from my existing streams of income. In addition to actual cash spent, I have also put countless hours getting it to where it is today. I'd like to recover what I can of that now.
The third reason is that my wife and I recently had our first child and that is taking up a lot of my free time. They are far more important to me than this project, so it makes sense to let it go on to a better home.
I honestly do not want to sell Twitturly because I know that it will be a very profitable business someday, if someone is able to spend time on it. Unfortunately I have to sell it though for it to continue to grow since I can't spend the time required on it. I would rather sell it and know that it has a future than hold onto it and watch it die.
My Availability / Involvement after the Sale
I will make myself available via email and phone for any questions for one month after I have migrated everything onto your servers. I want to continue to see Twitturly evolve so I will try my best to support you and your team during the learning phases.
Additionally, if needed, I can help you with locating and deciding which server setup you should use.
Things you'll get when you purchase Twitturly
- The entire codebase, including all unfinished work and data associated with Twitturly.
- My support for one month, plus I'll install everything on your servers.
- Twitturly.com and 12 other misspellings of Twitturly.com
- The @twitturly Twitter Login Credentials (currently has 1,667 followers)
- Access to various testing twitter accounts and a few that were going to be used for a new feature of Twitturly.
Ideal Buyer
The ideal buyer will either be a PHP programmer themselves, or have a small team that includes an experienced PHP programmer. This site can easily be handled by a small team of 1-3 people. I have personally managed it myself for most of the life of the project, so I know it can be done with one person.
Bidding
I am starting the bidding at $5,000 with a $50,000 BIN price and a since a reserve is required, it is set at $5,000. This auction is set to a 10 day auction. For personal reasons, this transaction will need to be completed and on your servers by the 23rd of this month.
Please bid early, and often. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Joel Strellner
