How Retweet.com was Built then Sold for $250k
Posted on April 27th, 2010 by Luke Moulton
We recently caught up with Tyson Quick, founder of ReTweet.com, and asked him a few questions about his record sale on Flippa. The Retweet website sold in early March 2010 for $250,000, and has been our largest website sale since Flippa launched in June 2009.
Tell us about the Retweet website sale.
We’ve only sold Retweet.com through Flippa. We originally planned to sell the website through a private broker, but later decided a competitive public auction was our best route for this domain.
We acquired (purchased) the domain during the explosion in the popularity of the Twitter.com platform.
Mesiab Labs had been building marketing software for Twitter for nearly 6 months when we saw the growing market demand for real time news and how Twitter was an essential tool in making this possible ( Hudson plane crash ). Now since news spreads through Twitter by users retweet’ing stories, we figured retweet.com was the most appropriate name for such a service.
After the domain name was acquired we spent the next couple of months building it up as a side project. We worked with crowd-sourced designers (ed: 99designs.com ) and a few highly-skilled outsourced programmers to help complete the project while we focused on our ( Mesiab Labs ) bottom line.
The website began to grow organically after online blogs and other press announced the release of Retweet.com, the popular name created much buzz around the web ( positive and negative ).
What inspired you to sell Retweet?
The website eventually got to a point where we realized it obviously shouldn’t be a side project ( rather someone’s main focus ). Since our expertise is in marketing software platforms, we felt that we had taken retweet.com as far as we could. This combined with our new focus on our latest startup company Jounce, Inc., we decided to sell.
Can you tell us about the strategies you used when going to auction?
Low starting price on a high profile domain name. No BIN at the beginning to see the market demand.
We added our website rt.nu to the auction ( URL shortening service )
What background checks did you do on bidders before accepting their bid?
Talked to them either by email or over the phone.
What payment process did you use?
Escrow.com
Can you tell me about your experience in transferring the site to the new owner?
We transferred our Amazon EC2 servers and domain registry over to the new owners after escrow completed.
Overall, how was your experience selling your website on Flippa?
It was great, simplistic.. great communication UI. The website is just barely being handed off.
About Tyson:
Tyson is a young serial entrepreneur who’s already helped start 5 companies. He formed and registered his first company at the age of 16.
Companies he’s had a key role in include: Atomik Culture LLC., Shenaniguns LLC., Digital Goods LLC., Mesiab Labs LLC ( retweet.com ) and his most recent start-up, Jounce Inc. (Co-Founder & CEO).
Comments (20)
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April 27, 2010 - 1:18 pm
Tyson,
Fantastic story! I love stories like this – it’s an inspiration to all of us. Good choice in using Flippa, that’s where we sell 100% of our sites as well.
Thanks for a great read,
Ian
April 27, 2010 - 2:41 pm
Nice post. Aside from the positive use of Flippa to sell this high end domain and service, it is interesting that the main motivation for the sale was that it had moved beyond the expertise and focus of the person who started it.
This is often the case and a salient lesson. Entreprenuers are good at starting companies and businesses but not necessarily best at growing and developing them over the longer term.
April 28, 2010 - 12:20 pm
Very true Rob. In fact there’s a whole post coming up on what motivates people to sell – and you’ve hit on one of the big ones.
April 27, 2010 - 7:18 pm
It really is a great example of what an uncomplicated environment flippa is. The system really does facilitate open comunication.
April 28, 2010 - 1:05 am
Don’t you just love it when you hear stories like that. New ideas are created everyday and can end up earning you thousands. Well done guys.
April 28, 2010 - 5:43 am
Great story. Now if I just had a domain like that… hmmmm!
April 28, 2010 - 9:15 am
Love to hear stories like this one. Why is it not me these things happen to:-)
April 28, 2010 - 2:24 pm
Anyone else find it slightly ironic that in this blog post, The retweet button is provided by TweetMeme not Retweet.com
April 29, 2010 - 2:10 am
Greatly motivated by this post! From what i learned the most important aspect is timing.
April 29, 2010 - 2:54 am
This is a great sale for ReTweet and Flippa… I wonder how the buyers are doing? Maybe you could do a follow up on them and see how their new site is going?
I would love to see more FOLLOW UP stories on the Flippa blogs. Not stories of how someone made money flipping a site on Flippa but how someone who BOUGHT a site (especially a “flipped” one) on Flippa ended up doing.
I recently saw a Flippa story on Ian & Amy Anderson. Maybe a story on their CLIENTS would be a great idea? It would be great to learn about all the money the buyers are making with these sites.
April 29, 2010 - 5:13 am
Great job on the article. More of these types of stories must be in store for Flippa. Great platform!
April 29, 2010 - 6:47 am
I love hearing stories like this… very inspiring. retweet.com was a moneymaker as just a domain alone, adding the site to it made it a steal at $250k, imo. Good stuff going on there, good stuff.
April 29, 2010 - 8:12 am
I noticed that with the retweet to Pyrogenic. lol
On another note, I found the article to very inspirational. It sets a common scene that just about all businesses go through in the beginning & then follows it up with motivational insight as to how they achieved it.
I think that people can easily duplicate their success after reading the article and develop some great business sites with the end users in mind.
Thanks for the inspiration
April 30, 2010 - 12:07 am
Awesome story and I’m inspired as hell!
It’s just a matter of (short) time until we all here @Flippa should be able for the first time to wonder about the $500K mark being reached…and then also beaten!
May 1, 2010 - 5:18 am
Truly inspirational, this market is really booming, we will see what will change with Facebook LIKE inovation
May 2, 2010 - 6:44 pm
wow! Awesome.. made me so exciting.
May 27, 2010 - 2:19 am
Nice stroy but just to clear a misconeption; retweet.com being sold highly on flippa doesn’t make flippa the best place to sell (not that I’m saying it’s a bad place to sell), the secret behind it got sold high is because it was a well done site. It would’ve been sold as high on any other listing site too. The news of a good domain or website selling easily spread like fire in hay, the buyer will not consider where it has been listed to buy. If you’re selling an unestablished domain you’d have to spread the news like you were making fire when u are cast away, and this is when the listing sites really compete.
May 27, 2010 - 4:01 am
if only all of my sites could sell like this! I’ve got a couple in the pipeline though that are growing in popularity and will soon be ripe enough for plucking to flippa!
January 28, 2011 - 12:24 pm
Arguably this domain and project could have secured a lot of funding if they wen’t down the venture cap route… I wonder why the price paid is what it is, and what the new owner will gain from it.
I know the guy who built retweet.com through a friend and good luck to him.
April 8, 2011 - 4:46 pm
it appears the website is no longer up, as it redirects to some video tagging website….
can anyone explain this?