Finally getting rid of his "huge mistake," the founder of the revenge site "Ship Your Enemies Glitter" sold the business for $85,000 in less than two weeks after it launched.
22-year-old Matthew Carpenter from Australia created a site that performed a single service—for $9.99 AUD or $8.11 USD customers could anonymously send their worst enemy an envelop full with glitter. The idea behind it was that once the envelop was opened, glitter would burst out everywhere, sticking to your enemies' hands, clothes and homes, making it ridiculously hard to clean up the "herpes of the craft world."
And after a Reddit thread made the site known, Carpenter received a ridiculous amount of orders. He became so overwhelmed that he announced he was selling the website after just 24-hours.
ShipYourEnemiesGlitter with 1m visits, 270k social shares, $xx,xxx in sales, tonnes of people wanting to order. 24 hours old. For sale.
— Mathew Carpenter (@matcarpenter) January 14, 2015
He also posted on ProductHunt.com a plea for customers to stop seeking sparkling revenge. "Hi guys, I'm the founder of this website. Please stop buying this horrible glitter product-I'm sick of dealing with it," he wrote.
Carpenter claims he took more than $20,000 in orders before he stopped the business because he was "sick of dealing with it."
So he put the site up for sale on Flippa, a marketplace where entrepreneurs can trade in domains or start-ups. On the first day of bidding, the site was up to $70,000. After 345 bids, Carpenter settled for $85,000.
A rep from Flippa says the winning bidder is Peter Boychuck, an online entrepreneur who has been part of the Flippa community for a year, having spent $83,000 on the site previously.
Since Ship Your Enemies Glitter has gained popularity, other copy-cat sites have popped up including the U.S. version called "Mat Won't But We Will."
