Brain-hurt scale = 6/10. A long time ago, back in the good ol’ days of the Google internet, I learnt the power of affiliate marketing first hand. Affiliate strategies let you take advantage of an assumed message source separation. This is where the customer assumes the source of the message is not the advertiser. Example, you pay the owner of a blog site within your niche, for the privilege of tapping into this pool of visitors in various ways. Prospects trust this more, because the message isn't coming from you the brand, but from a trusted source. So it will have a far more powerful effect on persuading people to buy. You’ll learn about this technique and much more, in this interview with Blake Hutchison, CEO of Flippa.
You'll have to excuse the quality of the audio. I had a slim chance to grab him in between sessions of a retail conference. so I bundled him into a nearby room to have a quick chat.
Flippa.com is a self described global online marketplace where people can buy and sell digital assets as well as entire businesses. In this episode, we wanted to go deeper into the use of acquisition as a growth lever. These assets could be an entire business, but also things like a social media account, a blog or even source code. Flippa is one of the world's largest marketplaces for digital assets, where a lot of savvy marketers and business owners prefer to purchase assets, which they then leverage, instead of going to the trouble of building them from scratch.
So we wanted to talk about the acquisition marketplace movement in general, but also explore all the different ways acquisition can be used strategically as a growth driver. With thousands of transacted businesses over the years, there’s no shortage of examples we tease out during the conversation.
Blake has been brought into the business recently, but he has a history of working with some of the top firms both in Australia and in Silicon Valley, from director of sales BDM roles at Lonely Planet in San Francisco to head of partnerships at Xero. More recently, he's moved into GM and Chief Revenue Officer roles before ending up as the CEO at Flippa. It becomes quickly obvious how competent he is about all things growth, marketing, sales, strategy as well as the tech startup process.
We talk about everything from the mistakes people make when buying businesses, the types of assets that are sold, and how people can leverage a really key competitive advantage that is often missed at larger, more bureaucratic firms which we both see as a key to modern growth in the years to come.
This episode really follows on nicely from the Peter Li episode, which covers more the corporate M&A space. This corporate market has a very different dynamic to this market which may have smaller transaction prices but is far larger in terms of total volume.
Until these online marketplaces came along, it was an underground market full of brokers and people in the know. Flippa and Microacquire are the platforms which are modernizing and scaling this market and there are many opportunities out there, easily within reach for those who are wishing to capitalize.
