[jasonfried]

FYI, I responded to select private Flippa messages from buyers I considered to be qualified. If someone was serious about spending $480,000, they should have gotten in touch privately and demonstrated that they were serious, qualified buyers.

Everyone had an equal chance to buy Sortfolio - one party stepped up and got it done.

[shazow]

I'm glad to hear about your attentive private responses.

HN has this culture of entrepreneurial voyeurism. When a unique scenario like Sortfolio gets posted, we like to watch how it unfolds and learn from the process. When dozens of interesting questions piled on without any response from you guys, I was disappointed.

Clearly you're well within your rights to do what you did, but I hope this sheds some light on some of the negativity and speculation. I am grateful for these last few updates you guys have given and I hope you'll consider writing a more detailed report once the dust settles.

[jasonfried]

We were quite open about the whole thing. We posted revenues, the deadline, the selling price, etc. Here was the post where we announced the sale on our blog: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3172-sortfolio-going-once-goi...

A number of serious buyers got in touch, asked a variety of different questions, and we got them direct answers.

[jbigelow76]

HN has this culture of entrepreneurial voyeurism. When a unique scenario like Sortfolio gets posted, we like to watch how it unfolds and learn from the process.

While we may say we want to learn the from the process, the vast majority really just want to see what was done and then tell everybody how they would have done it differently (and implicitly more correctly) ;)