I’ve been looking around on Flippa more and more these days and finding some pretty interesting things when I do. While I used to think of Flippa as a place to buy minisites that were generating a few bucks a month, today it has become a real marketplace for full scale online businesses.
It makes sense that larger more established online businesses are flocking to Flippa and buyers are too thanks to things like Due Diligence services, and streamlined revenue validation options. Gone are the days where you have to spend all your time sifting through junk to find that one special site, now Flippa is full of them.
So I thought it might be interesting to share a few sales that caught my eye starting with Ninja Outreach, a SaaS business that sold for $2.5M on Flippa last year.
When you look at the stats it’s not surprising to see this SaaS business sell for seven figures, they were doing north of $60k/mo in profit which is over $700,000/year. I would imagine this turned into a nice little revenue generating machine for the new owner given that the product was already built and they had over 1,300 clients.
Often the fear people have with online businesses is that something labeled as “turnkey” will be anything but that. This is where using Flippa’s Due Diligence service to really dig in can help to make sure you are getting something that’s as turnkey as you think.
Of course, I was super curious to know if the new owners had changed the site, and well, they did – and it looks like they also scored some major enterprise clients like Amazon, Walmart, and AirBnB to name a few. I think it’s safe to say, the company that bought this seems to know what they’re doing and my guess is it’s making a lot more than $700k/year in revenue.
The next sale that caught my eye took place about two months ago, it’s a site called JobsForFelonsHub.com and it sold for $500,000.
This is an interesting one as it’s in a niche I don’t know much about but certainly makes a lot of sense. The site has been around for seven years and was doing about $15.5k/mo in profit at the time it was purchased which comes out to around $186,000/year. At $500k the owner sold for a little less than 3x profit which puts it at a similar multiple to Ninja Outreach.
Taking a look at this site it doesn’t seem like the new owners did much sprucing up, instead I’m thinking they may have kept the site as it is, and hey, like the adage says, if it’s not broken, maybe there’s nothing to fix.
A site like this that ranks for popular search terms in a niche that’s not very crowded can probably run pretty smoothly as with regular content updates.
The last site that caught my eye sounds really darn cool but the site itself was kept confidential in the transaction. That being said, you can probably figure out what site it is given that the listing mentions that it’s Australia’s #1 pure play online kids fun store.
Another long-standing site, it was doing a little north of $30,000/mo in profit when it sold which comes out to $360,000/year. Doing the math that means the $850,000 sale valued the site at 2.36x revenue which feels like a pretty good deal for the buyer IMO.
As a Shopify store I’m guessing this probably involved managing physical inventory so this could be a reason why the multiple was lower than for a SaaS business. At the same time, if you ever dreamed of running your own toy store, this probably was a dream come true!
I could keep going as there are some really impressive businesses that have sold on Flippa over the last year but I’ll spare you from information overload. What I will note is that sure, you might not have six or seven figures to spend on a business, and as you’d expect, there are lots of great opportunities in the five and even four figure range.
There definitely seems to be more options than ever before for people who are interested in running an online business but who also don’t want to start at day zero. Congrats to all the people I mentioned who sold their online businesses on Flippa, and congrats to the new owners who are probably pretty darn happy right now 🎉
