Should we buy this competitor? NO
Today we received a weird email from Twimailer.com a competing service we believed it was important to share the story with our users and also with the users of this service
It is not in our practice to be critical about what a competitor do. But since this touching us directly we want to be transparent in what we think and what we do. We spotted this actor from day 1 for which we were happy (competiton is always good specially when our service is better :) ) but we also noticed some strange elements we kept for us until today.
Here is the story
Today we were offered to acquire Twimailer for a few thousands dollars. We have nothing against buying external companies although this is not part of our agenda. However we digged a little. We found worrying signs about it.
Twimailer was created by in the UK by Jon Weatley . However the email was not coming from him but from someone from Romania who claimed he acquired the domain and the application recently. We double clicked and found out this was the case (whois here). The acquisition is mentionned on Jon Weatley site but without details. The service claims several thousands users and a few other assets that between us have little value to us as is given our current growth.
We digged a little more as the email precise the service has a twitter account (@Twimailer) which is not working anymore because it was closed by Twitter. The owner claims “they forgot the password” and had to create a new one. However on the site both are still present. We also run a search on Twimailer in Twitter and found that many users are complaining about the service and registrations are closed (the company claims the service is being migrated)
What we found worrying is that the seller claims he wants to sell the domain only a few weeks after having acquired it claiming he s too busy to manage (why did he buy it in the first place btw? ). There is nothing wrong with that, but the site has no terms of services (at least we could not find any) and we don t believe it is fair to Twimailer users to sell a service without being transparent to them (specially when it is mentionned on their site “We don’t spam or do anything bad to your e-mail” )
Conclusion
New recent owner willing to sell, unclear reasons for sale, Twitter account suspended, users complaining…Needless to say we are not going to move a finger on that offer. Too many details are confusing and could even harm what we are trying to do. We are committed to a very high quality service and a continuous level of transparency as our current users can testify. Our privacy policy is displayed on our site and people know where to find us if necessary. We believe we re building a service that is here to last and don’t want our category to be harmed by story like those.
Special message to twimailer users> you do what you have to do. But in your shoes we would change the email on twitter settings. More than ever users should be careful who they give their data to. Of course we would be happy to welcome you on Topify.
update: check our story on ReadWriteWeb
