Last updated on September 18th, 2017 at 07:39 am

What’s up people!!!

I think this blog is turning into the quarterly blog, considering that based on the current rate of updating, I’m on track to make only 4 blog posts for all of 2017! How exciting…

But!

You know what’s more exciting?

I just sold my first business!

Yep, that’s right. I am now STILL not a millionaire!

But that’s not the point. The point is I’ve been working my ass off for the last year building a niche Shopify store that has developed into it’s own little brand with some real value.

Enough value, in fact, that I was able to list the sucker on flippa.com and make a decent chunk of money.

So that’s what this post is all about. I want to update you guys on why I haven’t been posting for 3 months now and what it’s like to sell your first business.

Let’s go!

Flippa Gets you Richa’

(the most cheesy subheading of all time)

A couple of months ago I talked to a friend of mine who had recently sold his business via flippa.com. As I was talking to him I was fascinated that people were just throwing up some websites and then listing them on this marketplace and people from all over the world were bidding on them.

I thought about my own website and how I was growing tired of running the thing on a daily basis as I was no longer learning anything new and it was more so just maintaining the site and the ads.

I never thought that people would be interested in buying a dropshipping website since it requires a pretty deep understanding of Facebook ads in order to drive the correct traffic to the site.

My friend quickly assured me that other people in this world have stupid money to play with and they’ll pretty much buy anything. He said that you can expect to sell for 18-30x monthly profit.

DAMN!

Now I was getting excited. I knew my own numbers and at these multiples I could be walking away with some decent cash to either sit on for awhile or use in whatever I do next.

In our next mastermind meeting (a meeting between highly powerful people who are determined to take over the world), I brought up my idea about selling my website. The other members suggested that I list the site just to see what I could get for it but maybe to hold on for a couple more months in order to squeeze more value out of the shop.

However, around this time, the store was being incredibly sporadic. It was around late February and my sales had basically been cut by one third compared to the month before. I was feeling frustrated and I wanted to move on to whatever my next project would be.

So I registered on flippa.com and began the process of filling out all of my store info…

Problem was, there was so much data that I hadn’t even looked at. Obviously, financial information is incredibly important when you’re trying to sell your business and I hadn’t clearly tracked out all my numbers.

So I went to work and started digging through my bank accounts, credit card statements, Facebook dashboards, and compiling every little expense that was related to the operation of the website.

Know Your Numbers

Not having tracked everything in the beginning really put a delay on things. I couldn’t list the site yet because I needed to organize all my information in a presentable manner.

This put selling on hold…

As mid-March approached sales began to pick back up.

Not long before, I had seen a competitor’s ad selling a similar product that I sell on my own store. The ad had lots of engagement which really pissed me off. So I immediately spent the next several hours making dozens of new ad sets and ran them with a “fuck it” attitude. Well, sometimes that’s the right attitude.

From March 10th to March 31st I generated about $8k in sales.

The consistency was looking good. I was averaging between $300-$400 day in sales and I figured I should finish out the listing that I had put up on Flippa.com.

I filled in the remaining data required to sell the site and set it up to go.

I chose a 14 day listing so that people would have time to look at all of the information, ask questions, and bid on the site.

Let the games begin…

Within 24 hours I was getting messages from people about my reserve price, which is the dollar amount you require the bidding to reach before agreeing to sell your site.

After week one, Flippa contacted me to let me know that they liked the site, the business and that they wanted to feature it as “Editor’s Choice” which would plaster it on the front page and ensure that it would get much more traffic. I was all for that so I said “YES!”

Within that time the bidding started to increase but not anywhere near my reserve price. I just figured that it was a dud but my friends assured me that bidding would pick up in the last 24 hours.

Final day arrives and the bidding is still way below what I thought it would be. At this point I’ve been in touch with several people who are serious buyers and they are throwing every question under the sun at me.

“Why are sales down in February? Why is Facebook ad spend so high? How do you find your products? How many suppliers do you have? etc, etc.”

About 3 hours before the auction ends, things started to pick up. I got contacted by a guy in China who wanted to win the auction very badly.

He started pushing up the price and out of nowhere comes some other guy who is determined to outbid him.

Finally, we got some action here!

The bids are now going up in $1,000 increments and I’m starting to think that I might actually hit my reserve.

One hour is left and I’m only a couple hundred bucks away from hitting my price. Bidder number 3 jumps in the game and outbids the other two. I finally hit my price and I sit back to watch the show.

With 30 minutes remaining, people are commenting all over the place on the listing. One guy wants to do a Skype call with me!

I jump on the call and in ten minutes I give him a full break down of my site and how it works. At this point, I don’t care if he bids or not but I figured it wouldn’t hurt.

Finally the auction ends and the sale is complete!

I have officially sold my first business!

I’ll admit, I was pretty excited but I wan’t jumping off the walls. I didn’t become a millionaire overnight and it’s not like I built and sold something that was super dear to my heart.

More than anything, I’ve seen this whole experience as just another notch in the belt towards bigger and better things. The things I learned by selling on Shopify over the last year are more valuable to me than the actual money earned from the sale. The extra cash in the bank to work on my next venture is just an added bonus.

With all that said, I’m going to take a break from staring at Facebook ads for awhile and enjoy myself a little bit. I want to post more to this blog and get back to some video making!

So stay tuned for another blog post in 3 months (hopefully not) and some epic travel videos of my upcoming trips to USA and more!