The Adventures of Huckabuck on Vitamin

Less than a month ago we put Huckabuck.com the search engine we’d been developing up for sale on EBay. We made the decision to spin off Huckabuck to refocus our attention on SiteMighty, and we decided to test the liquidity of the market for Web 2.0 applications on Ebay. It was an exciting and stressful time for us.

In the midst of the auction, I was emailing back and forth with Ryan Carson from Carson Systems about the Huckabuck auction. He was asking me probing questions about what I had learned from the conception, launch, and ultimately decision to move on from Huckabuck. I ended up writing a manifesto of sorts telling the Huckabuck story.

As revealing as it was, it really felt good to write down what I was feeling at that emotional time in the midst of the auction. As it turns out, Ryan liked the story and asked me if I’d be willing to publish it on Vitamin, a resource for folks like us on the web. I jumped at the chance, and have enjoyed working with Ryan and Lisa Price, the editor of Vitamin to bring the story to their audience.

We’d like invite our audience to head on over to Vitamin to read “The Adventures of Huckabuck”. It has juicy insights into how we run our operations here like this:

Meanwhile, Blake and I had spent the past few months developing a marketing plan for Huckabuck that was designed to deliver maximum consumer awareness within our budget of $25,000 (which was entirely self-funded). We developed a plan that combined a full scale awareness assault of the online world through community awareness in the blogosphere with a splashy marketing campaign here in New Orleans. We bought offline magazine ads, threw several parties, hosted a BrainJams unconference, hired street teams, donated 10 per cent of profits to New Orleans charities, sponsored events, signed on artists to sell their ring-tones through the site, and even actually hired a plane to fly around New Orleans Jazz Fest with a banner advertising Huckabuck.com.

Fortunately, the Huckabuck story is one with a happy ending. We are very pleased to announce that the new owner of Huckabuck is Van Glass, the founder of JSCAPE, developer of networking and security software components. He is very excited about the site and has extensive plans to invest in the product, add new features and continue to move it forward. We really are excited to have found a new home for Huckabuck with an owner who is as excited about the site as we have been and who we all hope will take it to the next level.