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Archive for the 'Dan Hoffer' Category

IPO! and some random numbers

CouchSurfing Inc. seems to have been more transparent than ever in the past couple of weeks. But as usual, you’ll find the most accurate news elsewhere. I’m not talking about OpenCS, this miserable bunch of folks who have been clamoring in the desert for years. No I’m talking about Spain’s most respected newspaper:
The CouchSurfing Chief assures that the objective is to get CS shares traded on the stock market. IPO! IPO!

So we go from NGO to B rated to IPO!

I don’t know what to think of this except for that we’ve been missing out on some financial analysis here. So…

Some random numbers

I don’t think the valuating the company based on the number of 3 million members makes any sense, a large part of those are not active (heck, quite a few must have died by now even). So let’s do a search “Everywhere” for people with host status Yes or Maybe. Today, I get about 350.000 results.

If we assume that 7.6 million US$ have bought 10% of the company that gives a value of a bit more than 200$ per host.

With the current rate of 30.000 new signups per week and a hosting ratio of about 40% (yes+maybe) that means the company’s value is increasing with 2.4 million US$ every week.

Not bad, aye?

Well, that presumes that the new signups are as much into hosting as people who signed up 5 years ago.

Funny enough, today there were 2500 fewer potential hosts than yesterday.

And… rumors have it that over 100.000 members have deleted their profile in the first week after the announcement of going B-corporate.