I think Sortfolio's secret weapon is not the code, the design or the feature set -- which I'm sure are all good -- but the fact that it was promoted by and connected from, eyeball traffic-wise, the huge audience that 37Signals, Basecamp, JF, DHH, already have. That said, if they can find a buyer who also has the ability to park it adjacent to a pre-existing web property, then it could be a smart buy. But if you don't have that? Probably a bad buy at the price they're asking. I'm reminded of how Atwood and Spolsky banded together to leverage their pre-existing eyeball streams to promote and get StackOverflow off the ground (essentially a repeat of what Spolsky did alone with his blog and FogCreek, but then on a large scale). There are lots of easy ways to make money if you already are famous and/or have a large traffic base. (See Paris Hilton.) Those methods don't exist for folks who don't start with that.
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I think Sortfolio's secret weapon is not the code, the design or the feature set -- which I'm sure are all good -- but the fact that it was promoted by and connected from, eyeball traffic-wise, the huge audience that 37Signals, Basecamp, JF, DHH, already have. That said, if they can find a buyer who also has the ability to park it adjacent to a pre-existing web property, then it could be a smart buy. But if you don't have that? Probably a bad buy at the price they're asking. I'm reminded of how Atwood and Spolsky banded together to leverage their pre-existing eyeball streams to promote and get StackOverflow off the ground (essentially a repeat of what Spolsky did alone with his blog and FogCreek, but then on a large scale). There are lots of easy ways to make money if you already are famous and/or have a large traffic base. (See Paris Hilton.) Those methods don't exist for folks who don't start with that.