Flippa: From Message Board To $41 Mil Marketplace For Web Sites – with Matt Mickiewicz

Matt Mickiewicz, SitePoint, Bootstrapping, Brand (branding), Marketplace, Scaling, Traffic

This is the story of how Flippa started out as simple message board conversations and was nurtured into a marketplace where $41 million dollars worth of web sites have been bought and sold.

The conversations happened on SitePoint, a community of designers and developers that Matt Mickiewicz bootstrapped. In this interview, he talks about how he kept growing the community by improving the marketplace, and why he thought it was important to also raise prices along the way. You’ll also hear how he handled the competitors who tried to overtake Flippa by offering free or low-priced alternatives and why they failed.

Matt Mickiewicz

SitePoint

Matt Mickiewicz is the Co-Founder of SitePoint, an online media company and information provider targeting the Web professional market, specifically Web Developers and Designers.

 

Before we start, you’ve probably seen posts like this on TechCrunch a lot, right? Where they list all the startups that were recently launched at Founder Institute? Well, I want to call your attention to it because Founder Institute is accepting applications right now, and I hope you apply. Because if you’re accepted, you’ll have access to experienced CEOs as mentors, you’ll get introductions to investors, you’ll have access to the press and other resources to help you launch your company right. They’re accepting applications right now at FounderInstitute.com.

And remember Patrick Buckley who I interviewed? He’s the guy who came up with an idea for an iPad case, and he built a store to sell it online. Well, a few months after he did that, he generated about a million dollars in sales. The platform Patrick used is Shopify. If you have an idea to sell anything, set up your store on Shopify.com. because Shopify stores are designed to...

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