Episode 123: Online Marketplace For Business with Blake Hutchinson

Simon Dell: So, welcome to the Cemoh Marketing Podcast. We have, this week on the show, a gentleman by the name of Blake Hutchison who is the CEO of Flippa. You're Down in Melbourne, aren't you?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, down in Melbourne, Simon. Thanks for having me on the show.

Simon Dell: Yeah. Welcome to the show. We were just saying, there's going to be people walking past Blake in the background there. It makes him feel like he's - I think it makes him look like he's in the newsroom there. Reminds me with the beard of the guy from the Commonwealth Bank who always does the finance updates on whatever channel that is.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, and he's got one hell of a beard.

Simon Dell: Tell us about Flippa, because I absolutely love the platform. It is horrifically addictive to see those emails come in every day and see what's available. Give us the elevator pitch for Flippa.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah. So look, we're a marketplace to buy and sell businesses. The businesses happen to be digital online, so people sell their Shopify stores, their Amazon stores, their WordPress blogs, their iOS and Android apps, and even SaaS businesses. So, think business, think digital, think small business owner who's grown something. It's revenue generating. And then on the other side, you've got a network of buyers, individuals and institutional buyers shopping around.

Simon Dell: Yeah. So, talk to me. I want to learn... I want to learn about the buyers first up. You were trying to mention institutional buyers. Like, is it just a complete mixed bag of people that are rocking up going, "Hey, that looks great. I want to buy that." What do you see as the typical buyer on the platform?

Blake Hutchison: Look, it is a mixed bag, but I will say that - I mean, maybe a little bit like buying an investment property.

Simon Dell: Okay.

Blake Hutchison: It tends to be that those people who have done it before tend to do better on the platform because they have experience, they can negotiate well. They're super communicative with the sellers. That's not to say that there's not lots of deals done for first time as there is, but as you move up the value chain and start to talk about quarter of a million-dollar deals, half a million dollar deals and a million above, it tends to be.  Whilst you might have hundreds of buyers interested, those buyers who have some expertise either in the category, the business model. So, category being whatever, horse riding. Business model being e-commerce. They will tend to do a better job negotiating on the platform just because of the expertise.

Simon Dell: Okay. And at the other end, who are the people that are building these? Is it, you know, 17-year-old kids in their bedroom, or is it other businesses as well? I mean, I only discovered two or three weeks ago that there was all the SaaS businesses and app businesses in there as well. And those normally aren't the sort of thing that you can knock up over a weekend and put together. They obviously involve a bit of time and effort. So, what do you see as the people that are building these?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, they do vary. But probably, the key thing to note is that the average asset selling on Flippa is four and a bit years old.

Simon Dell: Okay.

Blake Hutchison: So, they are genuine small business owners. They've built either a side hustle, so they go to work day to day just as you and I do. And on the side, they've got an e-commerce business or they've got a blog, or they've got an app and it's revenue generating. Or, they are people who do it full time and they've been running it for two or three, as I said, average being four and a bit years old.  And they've reached that point where either they're stretched and they can't get additional growth out of the asset. They want to go on and do something else, so they want to realize value and then invest elsewhere. Sometimes, that means going bigger and buying a bigger asset and leveraging the acquisition value to buy into the ecosystem again.  Or, as you said, in some cases, their companies, the companies that... Publishers, they own multiple assets. There's 1 or 2 or 10 assets within a portfolio that, for whatever reason, no longer fit their growth strategy. And so, they then sell those on Flippa. So look, it is a mixed bag, but ultimately, it comes down to is it a good quality aged asset, revenue generating on one of the platforms that most of us have heard of? WordPress, Amazon, Google, etc.

Simon Dell: Yeah, I think that point you made there about four and a half years is really telling. You've got to kind of give something, you know, a bit of a love and attention if it's going to go for, you know, if it's going on for four and a half years.  But at the same time, that strikes me as a good... You know, to have something for maybe a four- or five-year ownership with a view to selling out. It kind of feels like that's a really good business model. You know, we've got five years here. We're going to sell it out for, you know, the four- or five-year mark, put it on the marketplace and then potentially get - I mean, some of the businesses on there are getting huge sums, aren't they? I mean, you know, definitely six figures, but seven figures. What's the biggest sell that you've seen on the platform there?

Blake Hutchison: Well, there's an LOI on the platform right now for $35.5 million.

Simon Dell: Jesus.

Blake Hutchison: And so, that's... You know, that's clearly an institutional buyer. Buyer happens to be on the east coast of the US and it's clearly a sophisticated seller and the seller happens to be in Singapore. So, you've got an international deal playing out on the platform, and that's for an app portfolio.  So, they are a publisher of apps on the iOS. Now, is that typical? No, that's not typical. $35.5 million dollars deals don't happen a couple of times a day. So, the average deal, you know, a good deal for us, six figures, they're very, very common. You know, deals that are done $100,000 to $750,000, they're commonplace on the platform.  And they could be - you know, they're typically done on a net profit basis. So, the businesses revenue generating, as I alluded to, it's running at a margin of typically between what very high margin might be 90% margin for a content site, making passive income through AdSense. All the way through to a low margin e-commerce businesses clearing 15%. So, that hopefully gives you some sense.

Simon Dell: Before I talk a little bit more about actually building these kind of businesses and what you see works best. Your background, you've been to San Francisco, you've come back again. You've worked for Xero. Lots of lots of - when you look through your LinkedIn profile, there's lots of recognizable brand names in there. Where did you where did you sort of... Where did the light bulb come on for you that sort of went, "This is what I'm going to do here."

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, Simon, I've got an interesting story with Flippa. So, I founded a marketplace when I moved from San Francisco to Australia. I founded essentially a publisher, which was a daily email magazine covering the things to do in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. And that evolved into a marketplace for specialty food.  And so, sellers of specialty food, chocolate, honey, cheese, everything you can think of that you like to consume. Those producers would be encouraged to create a shopfront on our marketplace, and we then built a community around that of these consumers of that product. And so, these producers got to go to market directly versus having to go through to mainstream retailers. Now, I ended up listing that business on Flippa.

Simon Dell: Right, okay.

Blake Hutchison: So, my experience with the platform was as a customer. And then I went on did a bunch of other things. I worked for Xero, which is cloud accounting software.

Simon Dell: Of course. Yep.

Blake Hutchison: On the Australian leadership team, I then ran and ran a business here in Australia called Luxury Escapes, which many people will have heard of and ran that for the founding team there. And so, when the board came knocking, I knew what they were talking about. I believed in it because I'd done it myself. And I could also imagine a world both in Australia, but more pertinently, globally, where you had all of these small business owners who frankly had reached the pointy end of the lifecycle.  And therefore, I felt that what we were building as a platform was super worthwhile. Helping small business owners exit. Plus, you're enabling a pathway to business ownership. And so, that's turned out to be one really exciting for us to build as a platform. But secondly, the human stories -. 

Simon Dell: I can imagine, yeah. 

Blake Hutchison: Are really, really fun. I mean, I spoke to a gentleman this morning and he's just acquired an asset on the platform for $400,000. It's in the equestrian space. And he's an exec at a Nasdaq listed tech company based in San Francisco. He's resigned from that job and he's now buying this asset, and he's assembling a team around the asset. And he is going to scale this up. He has very, very significant vision for what he's going to do with this equestrian e-comm business. On the flip side, we've seen people who hate their day job. And they start buying small assets on the platform. Literally $1,000, $2,500.

Simon Dell: I've seen some of those, yeah.

Blake Hutchison: $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, and they amass them, and they learn a new skill set. And all of the sudden they quit their day job. They've got passive income and or an income stream. And they work less hard than they did for the man. And they make more, so that makes sense in a lot of ways.

Simon Dell: I got to say, to me, it sounds a lot less stress than trying to trade cryptocurrency at the moment. So I'm like, you know, I keep looking all my money. They're going and going, "Why am I doing this? Why don't I just go and buy a couple of assets and just..." Yeah.

Blake Hutchison: So, it's a good point. It's not speculative. It's not a speculative investment. You can see categorically how the asset is performed. So, let's just play it out. You've got an asset doing $5,000 a month in net, so that's $60,000 a year. Okay, that might sell for... Just for ease of numbers, it's probably going to sell far higher than this, but for ease of numbers, let's say two times.  So, it's going to sell for $120,000 dollars. That would be considered, for those who are sophisticated business investors, that would be considered cheap. And they're then getting on that, a 50% annualized return, right? Because I bought it for $120,000. It's making $60,000. I run it to the same level that it was running. I've made 50% ROI on that investment in year one. I do it year two. I've paid it off. And that doesn't even take into consideration all of the improvements and optimizations I make.  So, let's say it sells for $120,000. It was making $60,000, so I then run it just as well as the previous owner did. I'm getting a 50% return on investment in year one. I do that again in year two. I've paid off the asset now, and that doesn't even include optimization and or other growth opportunity for the asset I acquired. So, it's a strong asset class when you compare it to other cashflow generating asset classes. And of course, it's less speculative.

Simon Dell: Yeah. So, to go back to people that are wanting to build these things or grow these things, if you're sitting out there with an e-commerce business, and we've got a lot of clients with e-commerce businesses. What's selling the best? And I know that's a really kind of broad question, because it's really one of those "how long is a piece of string?" But what's the most... You know, what are the most attractive businesses out there? And is there particular categories or particular channels that sell best?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah. So, I mean, we'll start from the really simple, which is the business model. So, the most attractive business model for buyers right now is not for all buyers, just for a subset of buyers, is fulfilled by Amazon.

Simon Dell: Okay. 

Blake Hutchison: So, there's lots and lots of demand both for assets valued as low as $25,000, as much as assets valued up to $25 million. So, lots of demand fulfilled by Amazon. But let's be a little more specific. Your business is more attractive to a buyer when there is something unique about it.  Now, that's not to say that you can't just sell white t-shirts and like everyone else, build a successful business. It's just to say that if you're selling a business that sells white t-shirts, there's lots of substitutes for end users.  And so buyers, when they think about the competitiveness of the space. They worry about whether they can stand out, whether there's any defensibility. And they have to start thinking about cost to acquire the customer and going head-to-head with the competitive set for a Facebook and Google ads, and trying to win.  Whereas if it's truly unique, for instance, I spoke to a seller this morning who... They manufacture rails that go underneath a car seat, so that if you're a tall person, you can go further back in the seat. And he is killing it, right? I mean, he's got a business which is making a $250,000 clear a year.  It's highly niche. He owns the category. He's got seven patents. The manufacturing relationship is well established. He simply logs in each morning to big commerce. He prints out, he sends the labels. Before he goes off to his day job, he sends the labels to the manufacturer, and they then basically ship, and he collects the cash. Now, that business is going to be super attractive because it's highly defendable, it's unique. Now again, that's not to say that that is the status quo because most businesses aren't unique, but it is to say that buyers love uniqueness.

Simon Dell: Yeah, yeah. And I guess, you know, does that sort of uniqueness extend to... I mean, that's a unique product, you know? It's obviously, he's put some - he's put a level of thought and creativity. I mean, there might even be a patent on those kind of sort of, you know, that sort of thing. But do you think there is a level of uniqueness  that's commercially attractive when it comes to design, or whether it comes to the brand itself? Or is that just perhaps sort of less attractive?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, brand for sure, but let's not confuse brand with a social media following. So, a lot of a lot of people will say, "You know, I've got a one-year-old business, I've got 120,000 social media followers, and that needs to be worth something."  Now, the reality is what buyers pay for is financial and operational performance on typically, a trailing 12-month basis, but they look for opportunity. So, they pay for performance, but they look for opportunity. Now, where the brand matters is where quite clearly, there is strong word of mouth, predominantly direct organic traffic and strong repeat usage. That's the equivalent of a good brand.  And so, if you have a high repeat customer base, that will come with some brownie points, right? Buyers will like that and they factor that into the brand strength. But it's not to say the brand is simply as good as building a social media following.

Simon Dell: And I guess, to that point, having a product or a service that people use once and then maybe never use again is not going to be as attractive as somebody that's potentially logging on every week - not every week, but maybe every month to buy something or every three months to buy something. So, yeah.  I mean, we've seen a lot of... You know, again, we've got some clients here where the purchase is a bigger purchase, but it's only they're only ever likely to buy one of them. So, that social media following is not really worth much because although social media people have already bought the product.

Blake Hutchison: Yep, yep. Well, a social media following can be really exciting if the community - if it's less about acquiring paying for the customer to follow you, and it's more of a community sharing their excitement and their loyalty to the product post-purchase. Then, it can be worth something. And word of mouth is hard to measure, but there certainly are ways.  I mean, probably the one thing for business owners to understand is that a seller is emotional. And they talk about the things that have gone into the business that they love and that they think are worth a lot into the future. And they include their ideas and opportunities in that, whereas a buyer is unemotional and they look at it from an objective standpoint.  And so, the objectivity is the way to get the assets sold. "I sell X units per month on a profit margin of 65%. The landed cost of the product is $5. I then sell it for $12.50. And my customers love our product, as evidenced by a low refund rate of 3%."

Simon Dell: Yeah, and I guess that sort of leads me - that sort of answers my next question, is what are the metrics that those buyers are looking for? And I guess, you know, they're the hard metrics that, you know, return rates, profit margins, numbers sold per month. I guess cost of acquisition as well.  You know, you don't want to be selling a $100 item and it's costing you $90 to acquire the customer. Those are all important numbers. I guess things like, "Hey, we've got this amount of Instagram followers and we have this many likes on Facebook." They're what my business partner always calls vanity metrics. They're great to look at, but they don't really mean much in the long run.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you know, it's... I mean, frankly, we're no different here at Flippa, where we see a thousand new buyers register every day. That sounds wonderful. We love that. It's a cool metric. But the actual real question is, well, how many of those buyers are acquisition fit? Do they have the capital ready to go, the want and desire, the operational capability to buy within the next X period of time? That's the real metric that we think about daily. So, we're no different. I'm not suggesting that Flippa is any different to the sellers and buyers out there. It does come down to the data and the relevance of that data for the business's performance.

Simon Dell: And you might not be able to tell me this, or you might want to tell me this, but when you guys send an email out, I imagine that emails going out to a big database now, what sort of eyeballs are getting exposed if someone wants to sell their business on Flippa? How many people will see that business?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, I mean, it's a cool question. It's a cool question for us because we have extraordinarily big buyer reach. So, to answer the question bluntly, we have about 550,000 people receiving the daily. And you can of course choose the daily. You can choose the weekly, you can choose the monthly, whatever you like. But actually, that's cool. That's impressive. What's more impressive is the number of buyers who create alerts.  So, you know when you go on a property website and you look at houses, and you can see the neighbourhood you're interested in, and then the website will send you an update when a property matches your preferences, right? That's the big one for us.  So, we encourage buyers to set preferences, and then we match them up to the assets that match those preferences. And we see hundreds of thousands of those going out of date all over the world from the people who have set those preferences.

Simon Dell: It's a horribly addictive platform. It's like for four entrepreneurs who have that what we call that entrepreneurial ADD. It's just addictive. It's addictive because you go, "Oh, I want to own that," or it's addictive because you go, "I could build that and sell it."  And it's just... It's like idea after idea, you know, being thrown at you and you're kind of like a kid in a candy shop looking at these things going... But look, the other - the last thing I wanted to talk about was the partner network as well, because this is actually one of the reasons that I'd reached out to you to talk to you, and had a conversation with one of your team members was that there's the whole Flippa of partner network there as well.  So, if you're a digital agency or you're a consultant or whatever you are in that space, you guys have also built a network or a marketplace for other people to go and work with your sellers or the buyers, whichever way around, to help them grow their businesses. Is that relatively new, or was that something I've just stumbled on myself and it was just new to me?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, no. Simon, that's brand new, it's literally weeks old. And you know, businesses will tend to evolve and expand off customer feedback and insights, right?

Simon Dell: Yeah.

Blake Hutchison: So, we kept on saying, "So, buyers will buy," and grade that. That's cool. But our motivation is to help those buyers not only acquire, but then grow sustainably. And there's lots of people with money, but there's less people with expertise. And so, if we can match that money to expertise, then there's a far greater chance that that buyer is able to be successful and get a very, very strong return on investment.  So, the community kept on saying, "But do you have... Can you recommend CEO people to me? And we're like, Wow, this is pretty cool because we've got this massive community of 3 million registered users, and the group of people within that community are so damn good at what they do, right?"  So, if someone buys a content site, that doesn't necessarily mean they can write content, they can manage content. They have writers, they're good at SEO. So, we're going to match them up to agencies and experts post acquisition. So, buy the asset, and now here's a suite of experts who we've vetted, verified and trust will deliver an outstanding service for a good price point.

Simon Dell: Yeah. And that was - you know, we saw that and we're like, I mean, you know, our business model, the way that we operate, we're sort of going, well, we can give people, you know, "Hey, you need a social media expert four days a month? Here's someone." And it's very easy for us to plug those people into those kind of businesses. So, look, last question for you. What's next? I mean, you've talked about the partner network. That's a new thing. How does Flippa evolve from here, or is it just a growth strategy now?

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, it's about matching, so we see ourselves as being in the dating game. And you'll probably find it funny to hear that we spend a lot of time looking at dating websites. And so, we want to basically get to a point where buyers can obviously set explicit preferences, but we have an implicit understanding of what they want and are looking for. And we can therefore get a lot better with respect to matching.  And that's better for the seller because it means dealing with less buyers, but a higher probability of finding the right buyer. So, we spent a lot of time thinking about matching. Probably the other thing is a continual evolution of the services that Flippa can offer you to ensure that the transaction goes through in a trustworthy manner, as well as giving you the best chance of having success post acquisition.  And so, we've got due diligence services. We'll continue to build those out. We have legal services, we'll continue to build those out. We're also plugging into data. So, if you're a Shopify business owner, you can connect to the Shopify... Your Shopify account through the onboarding experience, pull down your data and expose that to the buyer community.  So, we'll continue to work on those integrations and make that a lot easier. So, to some extent, it is growth of the core business. There's a couple of nice innovations that we'll probably release in the next, I'd say, three to six months around, giving buyers a bit more access to different types of deals of different deal structure and types of investment and or purchase. So, that's in the wings for sure.

Simon Dell: Because that sort of strikes me as the next - you know, as an opportunity, there is people going, "Hey, I'm keen to buy the business, but I don't have $120,000 laying about, but I'm passionate and enthusiastic about it." And maybe there's a deal structure that says, "Well, you can still take the asset and buy the business and pay it off over 12 months or something." You know, those kind of things that sort of strike me as being an opportunity for you guys.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, that's right, Simon. I'm sorry to be on the ground while we're having a podcast, but I've got to plug my computer in. So, that's not very professional.

Simon Dell: No, mate. That's fine.

Blake Hutchison: So, I'm back. Sorry, everyone that was watching the video. But yeah, no, no. That's an obvious extension. So, we have so many buyers on the network, but do they want to buy, or do they want to just place money and get a return?

Simon Dell: That was my other thought, yeah. How can I buy 5% of that business or how can I buy 10% of that business and get a return off that? Because I still want the other people to run it, or maybe there's someone else that wants to buy it. And yeah, I mean, look, it strikes me that there's a... The Pandora's Box, you open that, and there's all sorts of different kind of weird and crazy, wonderful things that you guys could do with it.

Blake Hutchison: That's right. And remember that assets are evolving as well. So, we've got... You can buy an e-commerce asset, you can buy a content site, you can buy an app. But we've just recently enabled people the opportunity to list social media accounts. You know, you can list a YouTube channel.

Simon Dell: Wow, okay. Yes. 

Blake Hutchison: You can list an Instagram account. So, you know, there was an Instagram account last week, sold for $55,000. All it was a big Instagram account in a particular category. So, for us, you know, you can think about new markets, you can think about new products, and you can think about new customers. And we labour those decisions intensively here at Flipper. But you can imagine us launching into a bunch of different asset types, so long as they're digital first.

Simon Dell: Yeah, and I guess always there's the danger that the more you do, you lose that core focus of what Flippa was built to do, is that brand extension can sometimes lose focus, take you down the wrong tunnels, all those kind of things. But you know, obviously, you've got to still stay focused on what that core business is.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah, and look, the average size of deal is increasing as well. So, you've got to... Yeah, your point is really valid, around making sure that we don't lose sight of why the platform was created and who we represent in the first place. But you've also got to improve the platform because as people do more and more $500,000 deals, $5 million deals, the needs of the customer, both buyer and seller evolve, and so the platform is going to evolve.  So, we're working on a bunch of optimizations of what we call the "negotiation experience." And so, you'll see some evolution there. And you know, it's always a trade-off. Do you go after more customers or do you better service the existing customer?

Simon Dell: Yeah. Last question, you must have seen something come through that platform where you've gone and reached for your own wallet and gone, "I want to buy that." Has there been anything like that? And if not, you know, tell us something you've seen come through the platform that you've just gone... That surprised you. Something that you never thought was, you know, was going to turn up there. Something a little bit left of centre.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah. Look, I'll give you two. One's really serious and one's a bit funny. So, the one that was serious that I thought was just a really, really great asset, not crazy value, notepad.pw. And what it was was a one-page website to take notes and save notes just like Evernote, right?

Simon Dell: Yeah, yeah.

Blake Hutchison: But they were getting all over the world, a couple of million users a month who were just taking a note and saving a note to their desktop via the single web page asset, and it was surrounded with ad placements. And so, I mean, the maintenance of that site was so minimal. The hosting cost might've been $100 a month, and it was making good money, but the really important thing was they actually had fantastic repeat utilization.  And so, what I'm thinking is turn it into a little SaaS business, where you your first five notes are free and then you're... After that, you've got to pay a very small amount, call it a $1.99 a month to continue using it, right?  And so they, for me, are really exciting because the core business is sound. It's a cash cow. It's low operational overhead. You can continue your day job. You can get some nice site income. But if you're clever, if you're creative, if you're innovative, there's a bunch of additional ways you can optimize and make more money. And so, I loved that one for that reason. It ended up selling for about $75,000. And I think that's a damn good deal. I think that's a damn good deal.

Simon Dell: Oh, yeah. That is, yeah. I would've sold my cryptocurrency for that one. I would have definitely, definitely sold my Bitcoin for that.

Blake Hutchison: The other one, which was operating out of Canada. So, I'm here in Melbourne. Most of our assets are in the US, UK and Canada, was Panty by Post. And it was a subscription commerce business. And it's actually genius. They had a very, very loyal customer base. And basically, you're receiving underwear monthly. The customer was predominantly - the customer was female, for the most part, the customer demographic.  And basically, in Canada, they had something like 5,000 or 6,000 subscribers, who every two or three months, are receiving a box of panties. And so, damn good brand name, I thought too. Recurring revenue, which I love. And, lightweight product. So, your shipping cost was really low.

Simon Dell: Yeah, low. Yes. Yeah. Wow. Mate, it's been eye opening. I really, really appreciate your time today, and I hope people have got some ideas and those people that are running businesses or think of starting businesses. I think the real - the key thing for me with a product like Flippa on the market, it can answer that question, that old question that I ask business owners and have been asking business owners for years is, "What's your exit plan?"  And I think if you're in that digital e-commerce business space, this is a really tangible, you know, exit plan for them that they can kind of aspire to get to within however long. So, look, thank you for your time today. It's been very educational and you know, good luck with everything for 2022.

Blake Hutchison: Yeah. Thank you, Simon. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the chat.

Simon Dell: That's it for the Cemoh Marketing Podcast for this week. Thank you very much for tuning in. We look forward to you joining us next week. And if you want to find out any more about Cemoh, www.cemoh.com.