A couple years ago I created a small international proxy service.
The service was targeted at advertisers who wanted to advertise in other countries but didn't have an easy way to see international ads or landing pages from competitors(most landing pages in this niche were geotargeted and would redirect based on your IP). It probably took less than 10-15 hours to hack together in PHP.
I didn't have a freemium model or anything like that, I knew that this service had some value to some people and priced it at $50/month.
I never took this seriously as a major project/startup, and so the only promotion I did were a couple of forum posts in the Buy/Sell/Trade sections of relevant forums. In retrospect, it could have been much more successful had I taken the time to drive paid traffic to it. I remember the customer lifetime value was north of $300, and conversion rates were very respectable.
The service wasn't positioned as a tool for anonymity/illegal acts(we explicitly stated we kept logs), so I was able to avoid the problem of chargebacks common to such services.
Because of that, unlike other proxies that had to take payment in complex, nonreversible forms like Western Union, I could take PayPal payments and automatically provision an account on checkout. After you signed up, you would instantly be given unique IPs for the countries you selected that you could just plug into your browser. This ease of use was a key factor in the service's success.
It ended up making between $600-$1000 a month pretty consistently only a couple months after launch. Eventually, I got tired of dealing with support issues and sold the site on Flippa for a healthy revenue multiple.
The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.
Friendly French note: "coup de grace" actually means the last blow that achieved to kill something. From your story, it sounds more like it was the cherry on top.
So you sold the original site on Flippa and then also sold essentially the same code again to other people? Wasn't that against the terms of sale to the Flippa buyer?
No, the buyer didn't mind. He was buying the site more for the revenue/traction rather than te technology. It's actually very common to create a script and sell both developed sites based on it as well as the script itself.
The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.
Note to self, if I ever buy a site on Flippa, make sure to get a con-compete too.
Even if they sign it, I wouldn't expect most sellers there to honor it. When I last looked at flippa many of the sites were obvious clones of each other.
1. Build a template of a simple site
2. Create 10000 instances of it & SEO them one at a time
The service was targeted at advertisers who wanted to advertise in other countries but didn't have an easy way to see international ads or landing pages from competitors(most landing pages in this niche were geotargeted and would redirect based on your IP). It probably took less than 10-15 hours to hack together in PHP.
I didn't have a freemium model or anything like that, I knew that this service had some value to some people and priced it at $50/month.
I never took this seriously as a major project/startup, and so the only promotion I did were a couple of forum posts in the Buy/Sell/Trade sections of relevant forums. In retrospect, it could have been much more successful had I taken the time to drive paid traffic to it. I remember the customer lifetime value was north of $300, and conversion rates were very respectable.
The service wasn't positioned as a tool for anonymity/illegal acts(we explicitly stated we kept logs), so I was able to avoid the problem of chargebacks common to such services.
Because of that, unlike other proxies that had to take payment in complex, nonreversible forms like Western Union, I could take PayPal payments and automatically provision an account on checkout. After you signed up, you would instantly be given unique IPs for the countries you selected that you could just plug into your browser. This ease of use was a key factor in the service's success.
It ended up making between $600-$1000 a month pretty consistently only a couple months after launch. Eventually, I got tired of dealing with support issues and sold the site on Flippa for a healthy revenue multiple.
The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.