💸 A $1.6 Billion Dating Site Flip in 18 months

Nano Thought

When I first started Nano Flips, the idea was to just show how there were fantastic opportunities for anyone to buy, improve, and sell an online business with less than $500k.

As the newsletter has grown, it's become clear to me that many are unaware of the scale of internet businesses. With that said I wanted to highlight one of the greatest internet exits of all time:

James Camp 🛠,🛠 @JamesonCamp YouTube was once a dating website. Then its founders took it from $0 ⏩ $1,650,000,000 exit in 18 months. This is the AMAZING story of how they achieved the “impossible” 👇 pic.twitter.com/bZvRAL6zfZ January 31st 2023 16 Retweets 90 Likes

A flip doesn't have to be a small content site changing its ad network and being sold for more 12 months later, or an email marketing agency that is a great bolt on acquisition for a larger agency.

Sometimes, you create magic and fully pivot from a dating site to creating YouTube and exiting for $1.6 billion 18 months later like in the thread above.

If you cant afford to buy a business? You should be building one.

​

This Week’s Opportunities

Found some interesting deals this week, but lets start with a dating site on Flippa, you can see the listing here​

​

Before we dive into this one, I want to say that it would require a serious amount of due diligence for a potential buyer. But if it passed your due diligence, it looks like it could be a major win.

The listing is for a 22 year old Online Dating Site with trademark, Forums, Blogs, eCards, Videos, Quizzes, Poems, Articles, 8 million+ views per month, 95,000+ unique visits per month

First off a quick check in Ahrefs, lets me know this site is an SEO machine

But the major win is that its just monetized with Adsense...

It doesn't have the amount of members listed and emails, but there are several ways I would try and monetize this better.

Alone switching from Adsense, to something like Ezoic, MediaVine, or Adthrive could add 50%+ in revenue

But there is also a major opportunity to cut a deal with many different dating site affiliate programs or even dating coaching offers. If you went the "adult" route you could make a TON of money from promoting cam sites and the like, but if you wanted to keep it "vanilla" one could just promote a normal dating site like eharmony and easily get $10 a sign up.

If you converted 1% of the visitors - that would be 950 people a month OR $9500 in additional revenue

Now there are 10,000 rabbit holes we could go down in terms of other growth opportunities, but these are the obvious ones to me and its worth looking at the numbers if the above scenario played out (and it passed all the due dillegence checks required)

Purchase Price - $249,000

First 12 months revenue with tweaks to monetization - $208,446

New Valuation of Business at 40x monthly net valuation: $694,820

Total Value gained minus purchase price in 12 months: $445,820

I think everything here is relatively conservative, and you might be able to find an exit to one of the many larger dating companies, even one of these public ones in which an exit for stock would still be acceptable.

As always...do your own due diligence, the above is based off of what I see as an opportunity from the info provided in the listing and some light due diligence, not a deep dive. It just one of many scenarios that could play out and its up to you to do your own due diligence and see if this makes sense for you!

​
​Builders Build

As always here is a little plug for my podcast, here is a bit of a throwback to an episode of last year as we prep for a new and improved Builders Build in 2023.

What’s on the pod?

"It’s 2022, and the venture capital industry has NOT had a good year. The money has dried up a bit, and it looks like bootstrapping vs venture capital could be a viable option for you.

Being a profitable business may just turn out to be cool again. However, there are, without question, tons of businesses that would never have made it without the steady flow of capital from venture capital (VC) firms over the past decade. We’re not knocking them, we’re jus’ saying’…

Let’s first talk about this new format: Lil Pod #1. It’s big ideas in small soundbytes, more value in less time, hyper-focused puns and idioms thrown in-between. Like today’s pod…

Today, the team dives in to:

• James mentoring at Techstars
• What kinds of start-ups need VC money
• The insanity that is Byrd
• Other scooter brands
• And more (than you bargained for)!"

​

​Listen on Apple​

​Listen on Spotify​

​More info on our site​

​

Thanks for reading! I'll hit your inbox next week with another breakdown of a website opportunity!

Thanks from the Nano Flips team

(James)

​

​

P.S.

Check out 2 newsletters from my best friends you will love

Colin Landforce's personal newsletter for all things business building: builders.build/colin​​

Product People - Learn the art of building CPG brands with Oren Schauble: https://go.orenjohn.com/cpg/​

​

All investment strategies and investments involve risk of loss. Nothing contained in this newsletter should be construed as investment advice. Any reference to an investment's past or potential performance is not, and should not be construed as, a recommendation or as a guarantee of any specific outcome or profit.