Ask HN: What's Your Experience With Flippa?

[slindstr]

I'd like to build a website, cultivate it a bit, and then ultimately sell it so I decided to poke around on www.flippa.com today to see what people were actually buying. For the fun of it, I sorted by price and was looking through some of the sites that sold for around $10K (USD) and I was shocked to see that:

- a lot of them didn't seem to be much more than a hastily thrown together Wordpress blog

- a lot of the sites claimed high Google page ranks but the only way I could find them was by Googling their actual URL (They didn't specify the keywords they had high ranks for)

- a lot of them didn't even claim traffic numbers

What do you think is going on with that? Are there people out there that'll really buy a website no matter what and try to make it big? Have you ever bought or sold anything on Flippa? Any tips?

Thanks in advance HN!

[byoung2]

I sold 2 legitimate sites on Flippa earlier this year. One was a Wordpress blog that jus published RSS feeds of deals from commission junction and linkshare. It cost $50 to build and sold for $850, largely because it ranked well for a few long tail keywords and made a few bucks per month. The other was an ebook site that cost $250 to make (including the cost to have the ebook and a dozen blog posts written). I operated the site long enough to break even, then sold it on Flippa for $300.

From my limited experience, I would say that the lower priced auctions (under $2000) seem to be legit, but I have a feeling that the big ticket sites ($5000+) that either don't have verifiable histories (traffic, keywords, revenue) that sell are being sold back and forth between scammers. You can sell a fake site between 2 or 3 scam accounts for $3000, $5000, $7000 at a cost of a few hundred $, then sell it to an unsuspecting person for $10000, pointing to a history of being sold on Flippa as proof that the site is "legit"

For a legitimate site to sell on Flippa for a decent amount, it should have healthy organic traffic, preferably a high page rank, and verifiable revenue. But then the question would be, why would you sell it?

[Flippa_com → byoung2]

Great to hear you had successful sales on Flippa. Interesting theory on scammers. Be assured that we do a lot of work to identify and remove duplicate accounts to block this happening as well as stop shill bidding. Coordinated users could arguably still trade sites between themselves but this would be an expensive exercise for the sites over $5K. Finally, not sure how much value buyers put on a previous sale price is given the rapidly changing nature of the website in the right (or wrong!) hands ..

[slindstr → byoung2]

Thanks for the insight. It seemed like something fishy was going on and I'm glad that you think so too - that means I'm not (that) crazy :)

When you sold your websites was it fairly straightforward with how you had to transfer all of the materials over to the buyer, or is that something you just arrange behind the scenes with the buyer?

Also, I'm curious as to how you transferred the commission junction site - did you make it in such a way that the buyer could just substitute their affiliate id in for the deals?

[byoung2 → slindstr]

Of course I can't prove any of my theory, but there is something wrong when a 3 month old site with no traffic or revenue sells for $50,000.

For the sites I sold, the transfer was super easy. For the wordpress site, I ran a script to swap out the affiliate codes to the buyer's codes. The domain transfer was a GoDaddy push which took 3 minutes. I exported the database and used a login the client gave me to upload it to his hosting.

For the ebook site, I again logged in using credentials given to me by the client on his hosting and I uploaded the files, created the databases, and the site was online in 15 mintues.

[proexploit]

I would say there's not a lot of real, valuable sites on Flippa but they do come through. Sites of lower prices do have a better chance being legit but there's also a lot of worthless sites created just to sell. If you have a website with real, verifiable income, you can get $10,000 for it, you just need to prove it.

If you sell it within the first year, you probably can't get more than 4-6 times monthly revenue (not enough history). If you've got 12 months of revenue history, the prices start going up and solid sites get 10-12 months revenue etc.

[byoung2 → proexploit]

Good points...the sites I sold were 1 and 2 years old, with a solid record of revenue (however small). I recently tried to sell a brand new site (I built it in a weekend to test out a Php framework I wrote) but it was unsuccessful. It got a bid at $500, but I figured I'd keep it since it is making $50 a month already. I'll sell it again in a year and see how much I get then.

[static47]

I sold 5 sites on Sitepoint (name before it changed to flippa) same format, essentially the same site.

I provided complete transparency, with regards to reports, traffic, what I used for Adwords campaigns, monthly revenues and exact expenses. I also provided information on how I built/got content for all the sites. I answered all questions as they came in and even created secondary admin accounts so users could see statistics etc. in real time. (only if they requested by DM)

My lowest selling site was $800 and my most was $18,500 the user that bought that site re-skinned it and flipped it 6 months later for $72k, with less traffic and sales then what I had .. clearly I didn't know what I was selling, these were "fun" projects for me, that I got bored quickly, i find the fun in coming up and executing and once it get's to maintenance, I find I lose some interested. There are perfectly legit sites out there, you just have to dig and do your research.

for buying, I bought 3 sites, 2 of which were under $500. one site I bought for $2k was a total scam! The user falsified all the data and I fell for it. I was able to get my money back through google payments though.

one of the users on here recommended using Escrow, I'd agree.

If your selling a legitimate site and can document all the elements of the business for users, you should be able to get good value for it. Just be careful! There are a lot of scammers on the site.

[ryanto]

Does anyone have any experience selling wepapps? Something that sits on a database, memcache, solr, etc? I've got a few sites that use various frameworks/technologies that were fun projects that I no longer maintain. I've always thought about selling them, but have always hesitated due to the fear of having to spend time supporting them.

Are buyers generally technical? Could I just say, you get a huge performance boost when you turn on memcache, and they'll know what I mean?

Do they expect me to host the application, or do they want the code/database/domain all transfered over to them? If transfer, do they expect help setting it up?

Flippa has always perked my interest, but every time I look at it I just see a bunch of wordpress blogs that auto generate content. I'd love to hear some stories that involve apps more sophisticated than content blogs.

[flipfilter → ryanto]

Web Apps do sell, but typically they can end up being undervalued because people fail to understand the purpose or how they work.

If you do sell your App, remember that whilst buyers may be technical, they still appreciate clear English. Here's an example of an app listing gone slightly wrong

https://flippa.com/auctions/115892/

The guys seems like an incredible developer, but certainly not one to be let loose on marketing!

[coderdude]

I'd be careful. I sold jquerylist.com through Flippa for about $1700, but that was the second time around. The first time I tried to sell it the bids went higher and sold for $2500 except for the person didn't pay me. So I had to do it all over again (the first auction was a month long).

Flippa works, but be extremely careful who you accept bids from. There are so many sellers on there with fake accounts who just want to derail other sellers because they are mad haters. Also, go through escrow.com. Don't accept any other form of payment. You will need a third party to ensure you get your money (same goes for buyers from the other point of view).

[MisterWebz]

Do the buyers care about the technological aspects of the website? What i mean by this is, do they buy websites that aren't written in PHP?

[static47 → MisterWebz]

You should disclose everything you can about the site, including the tecnological aspects.

That said there may be items that you feel are your "secret sauce" then let users know that if they want that information, they need to DM you or you will tell them what you do generally and then tell them you will provide all the details/contacts etc. post sale.