I Wish More People Bcc'd Us On Their Confidential Acquisition Emails

Yesterday myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook reached out to FunAdvice President Jeremy Goodrich to talk about a possible acquisition. Based on certain assumptions, Cook said, he’d be prepared to offer $125,000 cash up front, $25,000 in consulting fees and $125,000 in MyYearBook stock.

Goodrich emailed Cook back and bcc’d us with his response: no deal. I asked Goodrich, who I don’t know, why he copied us on the email string. His response: “I won’t do that again, I thought techcrunch would find it interesting.”

Interesting indeed. I wish all startup founders did this. The email string is below, with some contact information removed. I’m sure Cook is thrilled.

Sorry, you were bcc’d on the email.

I won’t do that again, I thought techcrunch would find it interesting.

Best,
Jeremy Goodrich
Co-founder, FunAdvice

On 4/30/09, Michael Arrington wrote:
why am I cc’d on this?

On Apr 30, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Info Funadvice wrote:

Hi Geoff-

First, we’re sincerely flattered that MyYearBook would be interested in acquiring FunAdvice.com. I’m writing this under the assumption this is a real offer and not some prank.

In point of fact, our March numbers were far higher than compete would suggest – 3.7 million visitors and 3.4 million uniques…as we see you are a “quantified” publisher, I find it odd, but interesting, that you would mention our compete stats rather than the much higher quantcast numbers (which are pretty close to reality, for our US audience).

As we have grown 300% year over year (yes, you read that correctly) comparing April, 2009 with April, 2009…well, your valuation would seem to massively underestimate the value of FunAdvice. Based on Answerbag’s acquisition by InfoSearch Media (later re-sold to Demand) and the sale of faqfarm.com to Wiki.Answers…and, of course, Yedda by AOL…well, let me put this another way.

On Quantcast, it shows that your *monthly* uniques are about 2x our size:
http://www.quantcast.com/myyearbook.com (those are your real unique numbers…correct?)

In any event, your revenue estimate was off by a factor of ten…so, unless we could start talking from the same frame of reference…then, I’m not sure we can move forward with a serious acquisition
discussion.

Best,
Jeremy Goodrich
Co-founder & President, FunAdvice
http://www.funadvice.com/my/thedude

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 3:26 PM, wrote:

Jeremy,

I’ve been following funadvice.com and think you’ve built out a
great site on a low budget, which is a tremendous achievement.

I’m not sure if you would entertain an acquisition discussion, but it appears to me, based on compete.com data, that funadvice.com has 1.3M uniques and 4.2M pageviews in March. I’m not sure what your revenues are, but I would infer about $4200 per month.

If those basic assumptions are in the right ballpark, we’d be
prepared to offer, assuming we understood traffic sources enough to feel traffic would not plummet on your exit:

• $125,000 Cash Up Front
• $25,000 Cash After Successful Migration of Funadvice to our servers (would expect 3 mos or less) as a consulting fee
• $125,000 in Stock in myYearbook based on the valuation of our last round.

Please advise if you would be interested in such a deal. We have the budget to make only 1 such offer this quarter so I would appreciate a response in the relatively short term, as I only have 1 offer outstanding at any given moment.

If you’d like to speak more, I can be reached at 609-xxx-xxxx.

Sincerely,
Geoff Cook

CEO, myYearbook