This is a story of an electrician with no online experience, who 10x’ed the income of his first ever website purchase and sold it for more than 17x his buy price. It sounds unreal, but this is happening more and more in our community as the digital marketplace grows and people who are willing to learn and invest in websites create high growth assets for themselves.
Curd-nerd.com is a niche site that was listed on Flippa back in 2017 and publishes content about home cheesemaking – a very focused topic, built by experts in the field and with passionate followers. These sites are great buying targets because they usually have solid history and high quality content. This site also had good traffic – around 9,000 uniques per month, but it hadn’t had new content for years and the owner was ready to move on.
That is why Nathan decided to make it his first website purchase. Nathan is a student of ours at the eBusiness Institute who was learning how to buy and sell websites so that he could transition from being an electrician to earning income online. (How Nathan changed careers and became an online entrepreneur).
Even though he knew nothing about cheese making, he had learnt the right online marketing knowledge to renovate the site and increase it’s profits and traffic. Our rule at eBusiness Institute is always start small when you are learning, so for $950 Nathan bought himself an online asset returning around $20 per month on which he could practice his new website buying and renovation skills.
Why Its Smart To Start Small When Learning To Buy Websites
When we were professional business brokers, we would regularly encounter inexperienced business buyers spend upwards of $500,000 on their first business asset. We were shocked at the high risk these buyers were willing to take, which is one reason why we believe the website marketplace is such a powerful place to start your own business – you can get a good digital asset for under $1,000 to learn on.
The next step was the website renovation. Using the foundational marketing principles we teach, Nathan and his partner Alexa initially focused on redesigning the website to maximize conversions and profit. This meant adding a new theme to highlight the advertising blocks, and adding a broader range of monetizations other than just AdSense. This gave the site higher engagement, higher click-throughs and multiple streams of income that now brought in from $200-300 per month – more that 10x the original income.
$200-$300 per month may not sound much, but this was Nathan’s learning phase and as we remind our students, the process is exactly the same once you know what you are doing on much larger deals – it’s just there are more zeros involved. And this is where it gets really interesting when it comes to selling websites.
Lessons From Angel Investing
From our background of Angel Investing and being involved in multi-million dollar Private Equity deals, our ultimate goal is to 10x our initial investment – but it is rare in the start-up marketplace to actually achieve that. But here we are in a market where absolute beginners are achieving that goal on their first deals.
Moving Onto Bigger Website Deals
Moving forward to 2020, Nathan’s experience and budget for website acquisitions has grown well beyond $1,000 – it was time to liquidate and roll the money into other opportunities. We suggested he use the services of one of our other award winning graduates who now brokers websites on the Flippa platform – Joe Burrill, and who has done more than $500,000 in website deals (you can read about his journey from government clerk to successful website broker and investor here).
Why Use An Experienced Website Broker
The benefit of using a broker is that they bring a lot of experience and contacts to the table – in our experience, the sale price that brokers achieve more than covers their fees, and can even take the sale price beyond expectations. Joe prepared and managed the listing for Nathan and the result was incredible.
Curd-nerd sold for $16,900 – over 17x the pre-renovated buy price, and a great buy for the new owner too.
What is most inspiring from this story is that Nathan now has a skill that he can use at any level – from a $1,000 site to a $1 Million site. Our mission has always been to empower people with digital skills for life, and help them see the opportunities that are in the digital asset space right now.
In this time of coronavirus, we have seen many students who have purchased websites on Flippa achieve a doubling or even tripling of profits and traffic as surges of people have moved online to shop and find answers. One of the most common phrases we hear is “Thank goodness I’m earning online”
So the next stage for Nathan is to continue to build his portfolio – buy and renovate more sites, sell some of the smaller ones to roll into larger deals and keep growing his digital assets and cashflow – and all achievable without going into debt.
How Can You Find This Same Success?
If you would like to know more about applying a business and investment strategy to your website investing, or if you are a complete beginner in this marketplace and want to get up to speed quickly like Nathan did, then visit the eBusiness Institute for more inspiration and information on our digital education courses on buying and selling websites.
Curious what the website that you’ve been working on might be worth if you were to list it on Flippa today? Start a conversation with Flippa’s Valuation Bot below to find out!
