Sold just got acquired by Dropbox and closed their company

The opening line follows the boilerplate trend of acquisition posts. Being acqui-hired is not something that you should be celebrating with your users... PERIOD. (On a side note, I&#x27;m genuinely happy for you all. Getting paid isn&#x27;t a negative. It&#x27;s a huge opportunity, but don&#x27;t patronise your users).<p>&quot;Yey us. :D We&#x27;re super excited to announce we got acquired. High-five... too slow... Now go f* yourselves.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s incredibly condescending to assume that any of your users share your happiness and are apart of this experience...<p>&quot;We’re really excited...&quot;<p>You use &quot;we&quot; so many times as if your users are apart of your acqui-hire, yet only mention &quot;you&quot; (your users who made this possible) in the closing statement.<p>Be honest and graceful, but asking your users for a high five on the way out isn&#x27;t the way to do it.<p>PS. I hate posting negative comments. I&#x27;m a Brit, and like to be polite all the time....<p>EDIT: Call me out on this if you think I&#x27;m wrong. Other people who have read it think I&#x27;m just reading into it way too much. I tend to agree that I&#x27;m particular, and it could easily be chalked down to me being overly zealous to criticize another successful acqui-hire. :)

As someone unfamiliar with Sold, I really appreciated the &quot;What was Sold?&quot; section: I rarely, if ever, see that on shutdown&#x2F;acquisition placeholder pages and always wished more companies would do that.

This is how this letter reads to me:<p>Woohoo, we got acquired.<p>Thanks a lot for bringing our valuation up buy trusting us. We started $service to solve a problem that matters to you. Because of that we&#x27;re joining $totally_unrelated_product.<p>Thanks for all the fish.

funny, in the old school economy this would be a failure.<p>oh crap, i couldn&#x27;t run my company, the business i have built. i have failed my employees, my vision, my customers. all for naught, i got swallowed and now i am an employee.<p>but in web&#x2F;tech bubble? hooray, i flipped this shit for cash. so long suckas.

Build popular service, attract loyal user base, sell popular service to bigger company so they can gut it and screw your users; business as usual in the startup world, judging by 5 years of HN and Slashdot.<p>Every time I suggest this might not be a cool thing, people tell me I just don&#x27;t understand the business model, or something. Same thing yesterday when Microsoft announced they were ripping out Skype&#x27;s API. It&#x27;s weird.

Can anyone comment on the motivation for Dropbox to acquire a company that apparently helped people sell things? Is Dropbox interested in working in that domain or are they just picking up devs for their own product?

I get a google products vibe from these sorts of acquisitions. Don&#x27;t get too comfortable with that little startup! It could disappear tomorrow...

I guess it shouldn&#x27;t come as a surprise that a company named &quot;Sold&quot; sold itself when it got the chance.<p>Maybe more startups should choose M&amp;A-friendly names. Acquired.io, which is available for registration, is a sure winner.

Here&#x27;s the submission (and accompanying discussion) that introduced Sold to HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5801340" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5801340</a>

Sounds like another one for <a href="http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a>

I really don&#x27;t get why Dropbox has acquired during the past two years Snapjoy, Mailbox, Endorse and Sold. Their product didn&#x27;t change at all...

I think there is a space for an disruptive _accelerator_ that completely prohibits this kind of behavior (a.k.a. acquihires), like a make-it-a-big-or-sink-with-it kind of thing, so users (and potential users) would trust more their start-ups knowing that this luxury-garage-sales-of-engineers is not the goal.

This is a bit of a shame, Sold seemed like a good idea - I have some stuff I&#x27;d like to get rid of, but don&#x27;t want to spend much time setting up the listing etc.<p>I didn&#x27;t actually use them because they hadn&#x27;t branched out into the product category (PC Hardware) that I would have used them for.

I used it once and liked it. But they came across as dorky snobs in there marketing.

Hey Sold team... do you have any lessons learned to share with the community?

So they were acquihired?

First post I&#x27;ve read on HN today and here are the summarized talking points of commenters:<p>1. Oh noes, they are celebrating their acquisition with users. That jerks!<p>2. Small startups are like Google products -- prone to be discontinued or acquired and closed. Beware!<p>3. They failed their users and their business model is a failure. Failue!<p>4. &quot;What is sold?&quot;, &quot;meh&quot;, &quot;puns&quot;.<p>I love HN technical discussions but startup or business threads? So much negativity... Thats enogh HN for me for today.<p>Congratulations to Sold team!

I guess you could say they were...<p>(puts on sunglasses)<p>Sold?

Sold sold. Nice pun :)

i&#x27;m really interested to see what dropbox plans on doing by acquiring a service like this. Any ideas?

Congrats !