In April 2008, Serious Business raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners to expand Friends For Sale and build more social games. The financing was not an announcement that the company was being sold. The headline’s “not for sale” was a play on a Facebook game where users traded fictional versions of their friends.
What was Friends For Sale?
Friends For Sale was a Facebook application built around a pretend marketplace. Players used fictional in-game currency to buy and sell virtual representations of people in their social networks. They could give those representations gifts, add labels, or use ownership as a visible signal of attention and popularity. No real person or financial asset was being bought or sold.
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Friends had virtual prices, and players could bid against one another. Resales could push a friend’s price up; the seller kept some of the proceeds, while the person represented also received virtual currency. These rules turned social relationships into the game’s central resource rather than placing a conventional board, card, or arcade game inside Facebook.
The application’s design also raised questions beyond gameplay. Contemporary reporting said friends could be represented even if they had not installed the application. Privacy settings could limit what users saw, and the visibility of a person’s listing did not necessarily mean that person had chosen to participate. That made consent, privacy, and social pressure part of the product’s risks, without by itself establishing a legal violation. VentureBeat’s April 25, 2008 report described the mechanics and these concerns.
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Who created the game?
Friends For Sale was made by Serious Business, founded by Alex Le and Siqi Chen. Both had worked at semantic-search company PowerSet, later acquired by Microsoft. TechCrunch reported that the founders began working full time on the application around December 2007 after its growth persuaded them to leave their jobs. TechCrunch’s April 25, 2008 account also described their plans to develop games built around social relationships.
What did the $4 million financing mean?
Serious Business raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners in April 2008. The funding report appeared on April 25, and Lightspeed’s announcement followed on April 26. Steve Newcomb, formerly associated with PowerSet, was reported as joining the company’s board. The amount raised is reported; it should not be confused with a confirmed company valuation. TechCrunch described the financing as having a double-digit pre-money valuation but did not establish an exact valuation in the cited account.
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The stated purpose was growth: scaling the application and its infrastructure, expanding the team, developing more social games, and taking the concept to other social networks and developer platforms, including OpenSocial. TechCrunch reported that the company believed it could grow to roughly 12 engineers without raising money, making the round a way to accelerate expansion rather than simply keep the existing game running. Lightspeed’s announcement described its investment in Serious Business and the social-game opportunity.
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Why did the game attract attention?
The game made a person’s place in a social network legible as play: a rising price, competing bids, gifts, or ownership could all signal attention and status. Its viral potential came from the same relationships that supplied the game’s subject matter and its route to new users. Serious Business’s larger pitch was not just one Facebook hit, but games in which social skills and relationships shaped what players did.
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That model also made the business dependent on Facebook. The platform supplied identity, social connections, and distribution, while changes to permissions, privacy controls, discovery, or user habits could affect the product. A rapidly spreading application could also lose momentum; growth alone did not guarantee that users would keep playing.
How large was its audience?
Reports from the period use different measures, so their figures should not be treated as one consistent user count. VentureBeat said about 7 million Facebook users had installed the application and that it had more than 600,000 regular users. TechCrunch reported more than 600,000 daily active users. These are contemporary publication figures, not audited metrics, and “regular users,” installations, and daily active users are not interchangeable.
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Later acquisition coverage reported a different scale using monthly measures: roughly 5 million monthly active users in one account and more than 6 million monthly players in another. Historical summaries also cite about 700,000 daily users at a later point and a peak of approximately 6.5 million monthly users in November 2009. Those later figures are attributed reports, not a single comparable time series. The distinct figures appear in VentureBeat’s funding coverage, TechCrunch’s acquisition report, and Game Developer’s acquisition coverage.
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In 2008, coverage described banner advertising and sponsorships, alongside virtual goods as an emerging or planned source of revenue. The company did not fully disclose its monetization methods at the time, so it would be inaccurate to say that virtual goods were already its sole or dominant revenue source in April 2008.
Later reporting attributed most of Serious Business’s revenue to virtual goods, with branded advertising and sponsorships also contributing. That is a secondary account rather than an audited financial disclosure. The model’s logic was straightforward: a virtual economy created places for digital goods, while social connections helped the application spread. Vator’s acquisition coverage described the later revenue mix.
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What could go wrong?
The mechanics that made the application social also left it exposed to abuse and instability. VentureBeat’s contemporary report identified several weaknesses:
- Fake profiles and manipulation: Users could create fake accounts or profiles and, according to the report, buy and resell them, potentially distorting the virtual market.
- Incomplete visibility: Privacy settings could prevent players from seeing the full market, making prices and activity less transparent.
- Lost virtual investment: If a represented friend uninstalled the application, the player who had bought that virtual “pet” could lose the in-game money invested in it.
- Copycat pressure: Contemporary coverage named Zynga, SGN, and Owned among competitors; Owned was described as a clone with comparable traffic on some days. The report also linked the game to the earlier Human Gifts. Those descriptions are contemporary characterizations, not findings of legal infringement.
- Platform and retention risk: The application relied on Facebook’s social graph and platform access, while the broader Facebook-app market could produce fast growth followed by sharp declines.
What happened after the financing?
On February 11, 2010, Zynga acquired Serious Business. The purchase price was not disclosed, and employees were expected to join Zynga’s San Francisco headquarters, according to TechCrunch’s report. This was a separate event from the 2008 investment: the earlier “not for sale” headline described a financing round, not a permanent promise that Serious Business would never be acquired.
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Historical secondary accounts say Friends For Sale later moved to Lika Games and was discontinued in September 2011. The available account is not a primary shutdown announcement, so that final ownership and closure timeline is best treated as a reported history rather than a company-confirmed notice. See the historical summary and its account of the later discontinuation.
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