Wed 16 Aug 2006
Local Y-Combinator startup Kiko is up for sale on eBay. Having made fun of calendaring apps in the past, this isn’t exactly shocking, and you have to respect the Kiko founders’ willingness to let go. For sale is the domain name, the web hosting account, and all Kiko intellectual property including the software; as well as the option to buy a week of consulting time from the founders for $1500.
Now the big question is whether it’ll sell. Most of the recent, smaller tech acquisitions seem to be thinly veiled signing bonuses. Perhaps owning upcoming.org isn’t that important to Yahoo! — they could rebuild it in a few weeks — but it is a sign of hiring a highly competent person. As alternative to recruiters that charge $7000 per hire, an acquisition that binds a small group of people to your company for 3-5 years while their stock vests could easily be worth several tens of thousands. But without the option to acquire the Kiko team, I’m not sure who would buy their domain and software.
After all, who sits around with $50k wondering “gee, I wish I could get myself a neat but young implementation of something Google is really good at?”
Update: Tucows, the buyer, explains. Pretty convincing logic, actually.
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August 16th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
I’ll be interested to see if they sell.
When Kiko first came out, I was desperately in need of a web calendar. I was thrilled that one of the Y-Combinator startups was tackling the problem. And their software was even decent. But it had some bugs and it stuck everything in a tiny frame. Then they appear to have started working on a rewrite.
In the meantime, I got feed up and jumped to 30 Boxes. Which is must say, is also good software.
However, not long after that Google Calendar came out and I made the inevitable transition to having my mail and calendar hosted by the same company. It’s just easier that way.
I checked out Kiko’s rewrite when it finally finished. It was much better, but no different than any of the other calendars as far as I could tell.
This market doesn’t seem to have much in the way of differentiation.
August 16th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
That’s a good point, Topher. Calendaring might even be worse than to-do lists (I’m biased, of course), where you can squeeze in enough productivity or collaboration stuff to credibly stand apart from the others. Not that I’d suggesting starting a to-do list site to anyone wanting lots of users or attention.