{"id":44901,"date":"2023-10-20T15:39:27","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/how-flippa-hit-100-million-in-turnover-in-its-first-four-years-page-2-of-2-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:39:27","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:39:27","slug":"how-flippa-hit-100-million-in-turnover-in-its-first-four-years-page-2-of-2-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/how-flippa-hit-100-million-in-turnover-in-its-first-four-years-page-2-of-2-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"How Flippa hit $100 million in turnover in its first four years – Page 2 of 2 – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"

What have been the main drivers behind your growth?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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When we started, the idea came from our customers and we\u2019ve been adamant in listening to them.<\/p>\n

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We want to make it easier for them, so we are careful to test everything. It\u2019s far too easy to think you\u2019re the expert. The customers are the experts, so they need to test these things out.<\/p>\n

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One thing we have tried out is an evaluation tool, as are frequently asked how much is a site worth.<\/p>\n

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Sellers want to know how to value a site. So we have created a tool that uses mathematical modelling so that you can type in a domain name and be given some sense of what it\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n

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We went around in circles seeing how people used it and then tweaked it. It\u2019s like the lean start-up cycle \u2013 we refine as feedback comes in.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s a great way to get people into the market, because it shows your idea has value. If you\u2019ve got 1,000 people reading your site about cats, it gives you an idea about value of that site.<\/p>\n

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On top of this, there\u2019s definitely a broader trend towards the democratisation of work, where people are working for themselves rather than large companies.<\/p>\n

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Our site gives people the tools to work for themselves. You don\u2019t have to buy too many site that earn you $100 a week before you make decent living.<\/p>\n

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Much like Odesk, eLance and Freelancer.com, this can give you a good supplementary income stream.<\/p>\n

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What about marketing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Marketing is something we\u2019re looking at now. I\u2019m a software developer by background, as are a lot of us, so I like building features.<\/p>\n

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What we\u2019ve never been perfect at is marketing; actually getting it out there and advertising ourselves. We are hiring people on that side of things now. We aren\u2019t experts and we are lucky we haven\u2019t needed to be.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We are now at the point where we think \u2018we\u2019ve got a great product here, let\u2019s tell people about it.\u2019 Word of mouth has driven us so far, which is a wonderful thing. But it\u2019s very hard to gauge that. It\u2019s hard for my computer brain to deal with.<\/p>\n

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How have customer needs influenced your business?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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We have tweaked pricing a few times and the upgrades. We have a success fee that directly aligns our interests, which is really useful.<\/p>\n

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We have a success fee cap of $2,000, where it\u2019s fixed at the moment. It was $3,000 but we decided to change that. Things can change quickly, that\u2019s the good thing about the internet.<\/p>\n

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Pricing is an interesting one because people want to pay zero. But if people have problems or can\u2019t do something, we want to know about it.<\/p>\n

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As the company grows, there\u2019s the challenge of getting information flowing back to you. We have customer support team, but I want to know what that info is myself, so I can fix it.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s very important that we have contact with users \u2013 we love to know what they are thinking. We survey them regularly.<\/p>\n

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Being the GM of a three person team isn\u2019t really a GM. You are dealing with customers every day. I\u2019m personally concerned about losing touch of that as we grow \u2013 it\u2019s important to not forget your roots.<\/p>\n

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How do you filter the good ideas from the bad ones?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s easy to think you know best when you\u2019ve run a business for a few years, so it\u2019s important to give yourself a reality check.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m not the one buying and selling sites, so you need to keep in touch with people who are. It\u2019s important to not lose touch.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not like we sit down once a year to work out our strategy. We\u2019re a lean internet business, so the strategy is changing frequently to suit our goals.<\/p>\n

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There are a couple of products we are working on now. One is a website portfolio management system, because we know lot of users have more than one website and it gets tricky to manage<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

When you have more than one site, you need data quickly, if you have virus, broken links, rankings and so on.<\/p>\n

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We know that\u2019s what people want because they tell us. At the moment we have a free trial for this tool, as we want customers in and get their opinions.<\/p>\n

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But if it\u2019s a useful product and it creates value for users, they\u2019ll happy to share some of that value with us. So it could be a standalone thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What have been the main drivers behind your growth?   When we started, the idea came from our customers and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59025,"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\/44901"}],"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=44901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}