Can I sell my database if it's no longer making money?

I'm a developer at Clarity and was involved in the development of this feature. This specific feature was developed in house. We keep event logs around for a log of things and this feature is built on top of that. When you visit a certain page showing interest in an expert, we'll schedule a job to send this email. A few hours later, when the job runs, it verifies a few things against other logs and we send the email if it's a good fit. These days I would take a good look at Intercom (https://www.intercom.io/) to do this. They recently came out with event tracking (http://insideintercom.io/power-of-behavior-driven-messaging) making this kind of feature a lot easier to build.

Do both. Verify but continue to let them use the site in a limited capacity or even better have a message at the top reminding them to verify as they use the site. Keeping the message up will drive the right people to verify and the wrong people to continue to not verify.

It's hard to get a definite answer to this as these companies will not tell us how their algorithms work. Having said that: Based on my experience working with these APIs, it is totally possible to implement a real-time search like "socialmention.com" purely based on the APIs from Google, Twitter, Yahoo, or Facebook. On the other hand, crawling and saving all that data just for the eventuality that a customer might search for it is probably not economically viable and will also violate the Terms of Services of most of these APIs. Bottom line is: They are probably not crawling and caching.

They are getting interest through their traction in other cities. Since they are already in 20 cities and have approximately half a million users if you look at their Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.hinge.mobile.android), they can simply wait until one city "tips". This might also just be a strategy to artificially use scarcity since it works sometimes, such as with Mailbox(http://www.nirandfar.com/2013/07/psychology-of-scarcity.html). I think it doesn't really matter if they launch city after city, as they have $8M in funding and can just spend $5,000 on Facebook Ads and get 1,000 user in one city within a day. The effect of scarcity makes sense, if you are new and if you're a hyped startup such as Mailbox used to be. On the other hand, it makes sense if you don't have the resources to launch in many cities such as Uber, because they need the drivers first. I can also schedule a call, where I can tell you more about this as I've done a lot of apps and have a social network myself with Tennis Buddy.

I have. You will experience a much better return on investment, and your customers will have a much better experience when you take advantage of audience segmenting -- which Customer.io and the likes offer. To be far, you can achieve this same result with tools like Aweber, but they are not as intuitive because, frankly, they were made long before the best practice of segmented and event-based email notifications were established and as matured as they are now. Depending on your list size, a move can be a hassle. But, if you have a plan on how to monetize that list, and deliver incredible value to your subscribers, I would encourage you to move to platform that can slice and dice your list how you need. Any other questions, feel free to drop a note or schedule a call. -Shaun