I'm sorry for responding to such a simple question with such a long ramble. I got carried away. This isn't something I've really ever discussed before and while it's not exactly germane to the overall topic, maybe someone out there will get some use out of it?
Short answer: No, didn't sell it. Yes, had offers. Why? I was a misguided(?) idealist.
I started coding the project on a whim before I was old enough to drink. It was actually just my attempt to teach myself Perl (which was probably a poor choice of a first language, the way a 160mph Ferrari is probably not the car to learn to drive in). To facilitate my learning, I took an existing open source engine and played with it a bit. I pointed a few friends to it for kicks and didn't think anything of it again, for a few months, when I went back to delete everything. Except, when I went to wipe everything, I noticed that the access logs were really active. So I logged into the admin interface and saw that people were actually using the service. I never expected that.
Very soon after that, the limited software and its flat-file database had trouble keeping up with the user demand. It was a great opportunity to dig even deeper and learn by undertaking a big project -- dumping the open source solution and writing my own from scratch, which taught me all about Apache, SQL, Perl, etc. I didn't realize what I was getting myself into at the time, but in the end my first real Perl project (my first real coding project at all) was eventually a large 15,000 line program with a full accounting system, threaded hand-written forum system, authentication system, private messaging system, transaction system, etc.
Since I never expected to make money from it (I had the same spirit most BBS sysops of the previous decades had, which was that I just wanted to do something for the love of doing it and providing something I could watch people actually find useful), I didn't look at it as a commercial venture. I never advertised it. I never placed advertising on it. It was free. It was clean. It benefit users and not my pocket. (Just my ego).
After about five years, we had received some coverage in scene magazines and I began to receive inquiries from some established businesses. One of the best offers came from a company that has a chain of stores in malls for a demographic not too unrelated to that of my site's community. Think of the mall outlet that caters to mopey kids and its sister outlet that caters to plus-sized mopey kids . . .). I was never talking millions of dollars, but it would have been enough to buy a really nice house out-right in my early 20s.
But . . . I had my principals. I felt that letting a commercial entity take over the site would devalue the community. I didn't know what they might do and I didn't know if I could count on a new owner wanting to serve the community altruistically. Don't get me wrong -- I could have been bought, but I wasn't going to sell-out unless it was for a truly crazy amount of money (which didn't seem to happen as much back then as it did a few years later, when we started to see the Myspaces and Twitters pop up).
So, I turned them down. I also turned down the offers to sell my code to other people who wanted to run similar sites (mostly because I would rather have made it open-source one day, but being an amateur coder, I never felt secure enough to throw my mess of spaghetti out into the world and embarrassing myself).
There was one time when I considered trying to make money from it. I provided most of the services for free, but had some additional features for something like $10/yr. I had 2,000 paying subscribers in the first five days. Not bad right out of the gate. It was just a test and I made the community aware of that. My thought was to use the cash flow to expand the site and service. Perhaps to other niches and perhaps to expand to other elements of this niche community (beyond the user to user transactions). Maybe a sort of media empire that catered to this sub-culture. It wasn't long before I felt like the money wasn't necessary, though. Maybe it was just a poor estimation of self worth. That my time wasn't worth it and that I should be grateful anyone wanted to use my service and that trying to make money off my "hobby project" was somehow dirty. I no longer recall my precise rationalization, but I did eventually stop the paid service. More, I refunded 100% of what members had already paid.
The site continued on for another six years beyond that, before I started to lose interest in it and feel burned out.
At that point, I let the site linger on about two more years. Longer than it should have. It reached the point where I could not keep up with the sheer amount of work needed (primarily mediating user to user problems and responding to emails which were in the hundreds per day). Just the thought of even opening my email made my stomach churn. I stopped participating in my own forums. I essentially disappeared. I felt like I created a monster and was now at its mercy. The only reason I kept at it, at all, was out of a sense of obligation to the community. I knew people had vital friendships from it and either were or had in the past made a part of their living from it. I didn't know anyone trustworthy enough to hand the reigns over to, either and I figured commercializing it would destroy it eventually, anyway. So the only option in my head was to continue and make myself suffer or finally end it all.
After a year of working myself up to the point that I could say "goodbye" to it (by this point it had consumed literally 30% or more of my entire existence for my entire adult life and was like ending a very long relationship with a girlfriend), I posted a notice that I would be shutting things down in six months, with an explanation that I needed to regain my life so I could focus on other things. Work. Personal life (I only finally got around to buying a home after shutting it down). Not to mention, other projects. I was so focused on this project for over a decade that I didn't allow myself time to be creative and pursue other projects that I might have gone commercial with.
And, when the day came, I powered it down. That was almost exactly a year ago. The community has renewed itself via a Facebook group, apparently and I've been taking a much needed breather. Now I'm keeping my mind open for "the next cool project". Only, this time, with the experience under my belt from this former altruistic project. I may not have exploited it for the money it could have made and it may not have been a commercial success (though it was still a success in as much as it was heavily used by a ton of people) . . . but I gained a lot of value from it. Value in the way of experience. Of knowledge. Of things I can apply next time. How to better manage a community. To avoid taking everything on by yourself. To having specific goals in a project. To allowing yourself to set a price for your service and not feel obligated to do it for free "just because".
Note that I could have made money if I made that a priority. Either by going commercial over the long term or by selling out in the short term. Not "Web 2.0" money, but enough to make life a bit different. However, the way I started it up and maintained it and the expenses and investments involved are definitely relevant to any modern startup, I feel. If I could keep something this complex going for so long with so many people for what comes down to about $100/mo, then someone starting a site with less complexity than, say, an eBay -- should be able to do much more for possibly even less. This is why I am always baffled when someone requires millions of dollars to startup a site that . . . oh, I don't know . . . relays 140 character text messages to a group of followers. A service that has very little complexity at the heart of it and only really needs to deal with scaling (no small task, of course). Or sites that need tens of millions of dollars to start a blog that posts stories every day. Something that you could reasonably start for a few bucks and a little bit of your time. (I suspect it's because those investments are for people who want to start a company and a business rather than start a service - because the technical aspects always seem to be the cheapest element of the whole project!).
Thanks for letting me ramble. If you bothered to read the entire tome above, then I hope you took at least something tiny from it. One of these days, I should write some sort of a "learn from my mistakes" book for the web.
I hope one of the things you took from your experience is that you massively underestimate yourself, your worth and what you do--because reading what you wrote it certainly seems that way.
If you want to do YC but talk yourself out of it--I'd seriously suggest stop listening to yourself on that one. :)
