In January, I wrote about an exciting new startup, Sortable, based out of Waterloo, Canada that aimed to disrupt the product recommendation vertical. Sortable adopted a contrarian approach to product recommendations: instead of dumbing down the service (like Hunch) to the point of making it redundant, it gave consumers all the possible tools they would need to make a better purchase decision. The end result wasn’t simple, but it was thorough, and I loved it.
Yesterday, Sortable announced that it is being acquired by Rebellion Media, a conglomerate of various tech, sports, entertainment and health properties. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Rebellion Media boasts of a bundle of popular websites in its kitty, including Manolith, Fighters.com and Fightline. For all purposes, though, Sortable should be the star attraction in its portfolio.
Sortable has been growing at an impressive pace and now averages over 4 million visitors each month. The team has ambitions beyond product recommendations – it wants to become a complete ‘decision engine’: a mountain Hunch wanted (and failed) to climb. Being at Rebellion Media should provide the fledgling startup with the resources to realize this vision.
In a blog post on the Sortable website, the team notes:
Rebellion provides us a home where our mission gets supercharged, where we’re tasked with taking our technology and applying it to everything from real estate, movies, and restaurants to mutual funds, fashion, and travel. At Rebellion we’re going to have a simple mission: take what we do and do it at huge scale.
The technology is certainly impressive enough for consumer electronics recommendations, though it remains to be seen how the team tweaks it for non-physical products. In an email, the Sortable team claimed that it is currently providing only ‘5% of the experience’ that it has in the pipeline. Hopefully, the remaining 95% will be as useful and exciting.
My congratulations to the Sortable team and good luck for the future at Rebellion Media!