Even though I’ve been selling on Flippa for the past 7 years (or at least trying to), I’ve only recently gotten into the groove of it.
In my experience, what I’ve learned so far is that Flippa buyers aren’t much interested in only domains (unless they’re strikingly good one-word domains like water.com, books.com, etc.), but more so, ideas, ideas that are proven to produce revenue or that have a clear and strong model for starting to make revenue.
For example, instead of just attempting to sell the gigdig.org domain alone by itself with a brief explanation of what the site could be, if someone built it, I’ve actually gone ahead and built it, fully-branded, with a working e-commerce function in place. This adds much more value, to sell it as a functioning starter site as opposed to simply a domain with “potential” to be something.
Another interesting anecdote I can share is that you never know the value of something, not really. Sure, you can look at the monthly average earnings of a company and then multiply that by 24 for a basic two-year valuation (as just an example, there are plenty of other formulas to value a site).
However, intrinsic value is oftentimes much more powerful. Some buyers may not care very much at all about making money and merely want a project, out of personal sentiment or curiosity. I sold one project on this principle, because the buyer was simply interested in the idea, thought it was neat.
You can always see what auction listings I have active by visited this link. While I have a lot more projects already in line that I’ll be looking to find new owners for, I’m trying to only have a few active at a time (this may change). Essentially, the reason for this is that I want to focus just on one or two auctions at a time to give it promotion and also to have time to be very responsive to comments or private messages from interested buyers.
One other way that I’m trying to excel at being a great seller on Flippa is the transfer period. The bare minimum you’re required to do after receiving payment is to provide them all the site files, domain transfer code, and the logins to all external assets (like social media profiles) then take the money and run.
However, I’ve taken this one step further by actually installing their new sites, creating the database and uploading the files, setting up the new email account, adjusting the DNS so that there’s never any downtime, offering technical and business support after the transaction is complete, etc.
I think what sets me apart from a lot of sellers on Flippa is that I’m not a domain broker, I’m an ideas man, and very much a serial entrepreneur at this point. I have ideas constantly, and I enjoy trying them out. I also greatly enjoy handing those ideas off to new owners where they’ll live on when I lose interest or don’t have the time or money to nurture them anymore.
Some projects are harder to let go of than others (I was a bit sad to let go of TidyThemes), but when a project has gone stagnant and it’s gathering dust cause I’m simply not doing anything with it, it’s time to move on. I have to have a great deal of passion for a project or be able to otherwise justify holding onto it nowadays to keep running it.
I can’t say if it’ll become a full-time gig, but for now, I’m enjoying myself.