More for the sabi than the car, A note about Carsabi

Car-buying service Carsabi has been acquired by Facebook, sort of. Just not for the car part, that part went to ark.com.

Founders Dwight Crow and Christopher Berner were acqui-hired by Facebook. Terms with Facebook where not disclosed, but it has come out that the site was bought for around $32,000.  What is clear is that Facebook is not getting into the business of helping you buy and sell cars. At least, not anymore than it already has via the Facebook Marketplace app, powered by Oodle.

The founders announced their new jobs on the Carsabi blog:

We created Carsabi back in Oct 2011 with the goal of easing the process of purchasing a used car and providing a service that aims to index every automotive vehicle and connect more users to their car of choice each day.

But now it’s time for us to take a different turn. We want to take this impact to the next level – and help Facebook users connect and share. Because Facebook is not acquiring Carsabi.com, we’re looking for someone to buy the Carsabi service, so the two of us can focus on our new jobs. We can’t thank all of you that have used Carsabi enough – developing Carsabi has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and we hope we helped you think differently about how to find the perfect used car!

We want to give special thanks to our partners, customers, and investors for helping us fulfill our dream.

Christopher & Dwight

A Y Combinator grad with attitude, Carsabi launched at Demo Day in March of 2012. The goal was to index every vehicle for sale and connect the right user to the right car. That goal became a tougher job when, in its crusade to shut down competition, Craigslist blocked Carsabi from indexing its car listings.

This was the start of a major drop in traffic for them.  That turned around for a short time after the purchase, when the founders where on the TV show Start-Ups Silicon Valley.  The front page of Carsabi was redone to bring in that extra traffic from people watching the show.

Crow and Berner found Ark.com to take over the Carsabi service, since Facebook will not be taking that over, but it’s was unclear what Ark was going to do with a scraping service that is blocked from one of the key scraping sources … and, as a Y Combinator company doesn’t have a ton of investment.

And now that they site is returning Application Errors:

I have been told that Ark is rebuilding the site, but this was months ago at this point, and with how long before that they site did not load right as talked about on many other blogs and such.  The talk is that they are just shelving the project being that it was making them nothing, and had a large over head for nothing coming in.  Most people asked where Carsabi could have made it's money, being that it was mostly an indexing service more then anything else.  Having been around car marketing now for some time, I see many options as to where it could have made its money, but with the site not running guess it is just another good idea that has come on gone.