It's being reported that Sampler recently filed for bankruptcy. ☠
Toronto-based Sampler has filed for bankruptcy, BetaKit has learned.
The digital product sampling startup filed an assignment of bankruptcy on June 27 and held its first meeting of creditors on July 22, according to documents BetaKit obtained from Canada’s Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy.
At the date of filing, Sampler had total liabilities of $12.9 million and total assets of more than $300,000.
This would explain the worrying trends I recently noticed with Sampler.
For starters, earlier this summer they nixed their affiliate program, which is never a good sign. Acquiring new users via affiliates, like HIF, is always much cheaper for a company compared to running traditional advertising, either online or in the real world. When a company can't pay affiliates and then bails on paying out multiple month's worth of previous earnings, it's almost always a sign that they're about to go under.
Then a month or so ago, I noticed that every Sampler link stopped working. The most recent freebie I posted from them was in late June. Now when you click the link (or any of their other links), you get a error message stating “We are currently down for maintenance. Please check back later.”
I think it's safe to say we've seen the last of Sampler. Which is a shame, especially considering how bad the freebie landscape has become over the past 5 years. One thing about Sampler that I couldn't say for most other freebie suppliers was that their samples always (1) arrived in the mail and (2) often very quickly!
Another sad part to the story is I don't think this was a business that should have struggled to turn a small profit, particularly given their subscriber base and numerous company relationships. I mean this was a company that pulled in $9.7 million in fundraising. I'm shocked they weren't able to make a profit on people's data after all this time. The BetaKit article paints them as a typical startup focused on growth over all else. Those acquisitions they made last year were especially dumb.
Oh well. Fingers crossed some other freebie supplier company steps into the very large shoes vacated by Sampler.
