{"id":39509,"date":"2023-10-20T15:02:57","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/how-flippa-hit-100-million-in-turnover-in-its-first-four-years-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:02:57","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:02:57","slug":"how-flippa-hit-100-million-in-turnover-in-its-first-four-years-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/how-flippa-hit-100-million-in-turnover-in-its-first-four-years-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"How Flippa hit $100 million in turnover in its first four years – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/div>\n

At a time when many Australian exporters are suffering because of the strong dollar, one start-up is making it big online.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Melbourne-based Flippa<\/a> has just broken through the $100 million turnover milestone just four years after it launched. Almost as impressively, just 5% of its traffic and business comes from Australia.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Founded as a spin-off from Sitepoint<\/a> by Mark Harbottle, Matt Mickiewicz and Dave Slutzkin, the venture allows for the \u201cflipping\u201d of websites by creating a marketplace for them to be bought and sold.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The business, which has 14 employees, posted revenues of $3.2 million last year and was highly placed in this year\u2019s StartupSmart Awards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

StartupSmart<\/i> speaks to Slutzkin about how Flippa has attracted an army of customers with almost no marketing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the philosophy behind Flippa?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We think that our customers have the best ideas. Sitepoint had a lot of clever people using it who sold websites on its forums. It made sense to formalise that role and create a proper marketplace with a structured place to sell a website.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

So four years ago, we spun Flippa out and it has grown strongly. We\u2019ve made it 10 times better than it was at the start, I\u2019d say.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

How many sites have been sold through Flippa?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

About 100,000 sites have been sold. At entry level of the market, have lot of sites selling for $300 to $500. There is a good group of sellers there but the buyers quite disparate.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then at the other end, when you\u2019re looking at sites worth $50,000 to $300,000, you have sellers who drop in once, because not many people have that many valuable sites to sell, but buyers hang around. A lot of the buyers are investors and entrepreneurs looking to make money off valuable sites.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

On pricing, we leave it up to the market because people out there are a lot better at that kind of thing. Safety is the most important thing, so we do a lot of vetting.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once in a while we are proven wrong in value; people see things they really value that we don\u2019t. So it\u2019s best left to the market.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you put a lot of work into something, you value that work fairly highly. A year of your time is worth a lot of money.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Around 50% of the market is at the entry level, and then the more elaborate sites are priced at anything from $1,000 to $500,000.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What has been the most expensive site sold on Flippa?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We sold a site for $830,000, which was a private transaction that only the buyer saw.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other than that, Inquisitr<\/a>, at $330,000, is a pretty good Australian example of a site that sold for a decent amount of money.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is your pricing strategy is similar to eBay?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We take small fee up front (of $29) because you need barrier to entry to avoid being flooded by every site in the world.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it then works like eBay in terms of promoting the site to sell, such as adding pictures and making the listing in bold.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We ask almost every day \u2018what would eBay do?\u2019 They are a great company, so it would be folly to ignore them. They\u2019ve got a few more people than us, so I think they know what they are doing when they change something in the selling process.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t slavishly follow them, but we certainly note what doing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your selling process like, then?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

You have to prove you own the site, which you can do by adding a meta tag front tag, or by sending an email from the domain address. That takes 30 seconds.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The seller has to write a pitch themselves to says what the site is, why it\u2019s good, and why they are selling.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018Why are you selling it?\u2019 is a big question. It might be just because you\u2019re bored. But we encourage people to put as much information as possible.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Story continues on page 2. Please click below.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At a time when many Australian exporters are suffering because of the strong dollar, one start-up is making it big<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39509"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}