{"id":24570,"date":"2023-11-23T22:35:14","date_gmt":"2023-11-23T12:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/3-growth-strategies-that-turned-a-1k-website-investment-into-a-3-75m-fintech-startup\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T23:43:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T13:43:36","slug":"3-growth-strategies-that-turned-a-1k-website-investment-into-a-3-75m-fintech-startup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flippa.com\/blog\/3-growth-strategies-that-turned-a-1k-website-investment-into-a-3-75m-fintech-startup\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Growth Strategies that Turned a $1K Website Investment into a $3.75M Fintech Startup"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cCompanies are bought, not sold,\u201d <\/em>as the saying goes. In other words, successful acquisitions are when a buyer recognizes value in a company and actively pursues the acquisition rather than the company needing to market or “sell” itself aggressively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how exactly does one grow their business to become an acquisition target? In this post, I will explain exactly how I did it, and I\u2019ll cover the steps I took to grow OurFamilyPlace.com<\/a> (OFP) from a failing content website into a popular homeowner website that now generates hundreds of qualified leads for my fintech startup, House Numbers. The buyer \u2014 and now co-founders \u2014 executed this rollup strategy with the plan to provide us with a unique acquisition source of homeowners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Flippa\u2019s intelligent valuations engine is the industry’s most accurate tool, taking into consideration thousands of sales and live buyer demand. Find out what your business is worth with our free valuation tool and plan your next move<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To give some background, I purchased OFP on Flippa<\/a> in 2020 for about $1,000. I originally planned to fix it up for a quick sale, but my plans changed when I was approached by a good friend, and now co-founder, about rolling up my site into a larger venture-backed business targeting homeowners. It was the perfect merger because I have years of experience building and growing websites, and my cofounders had a great idea to help homeowners with their finances but didn\u2019t have digital marketing experience. This post is about how we leveraged a simple Flippa acquisition to raise over $3.75 million from Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists<\/a>. I\u2019ll walk you through how we rebuilt OFP from the ground up and started generating hundreds of leads for our startup. I bucket my strategies into one of three growth buckets:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Design<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Content<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Backlinks<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I\u2019m excited to walk you through my journey with OFP\u2026 keep reading to learn more!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    1. Website Redesign & Restructure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Building a profitable website always starts with a great design. Unlike Craigslist or Wikipedia, the rest of us operate in a reality where looks do<\/em> matter. For me, that meant designing and deploying a layout that not only converted readers into subscribers but also was an asset my co-founders felt was worth acquiring. Put yourself in the shoes of a buyer \u2014 what exactly are they purchasing? If there\u2019s one thing I\u2019ve learned over the years, most buyers do not<\/em> want a fixer-upper. They want a beautiful, trustworthy, income-producing website. Applying what I know about real estate and curb appeal, nothing adds more value for little effort than aesthetic upgrades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And that\u2019s exactly what I did as a first step after acquiring OFP \u2014 a simple design audit and update. Nothing too expensive or complex, but some cosmetic work that added a ton of value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Here is what the website looked like before<\/em> I acquired it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    And here is what it looked like after:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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    Three Immediate Benefits I Saw After Our Website Redesign<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Redesigning my site\u2019s user experience (UX) had more benefits than I initially anticipated. The first was obvious: great UX led to more trust and authority with my visitors. As readers scan our content, they look for signals that we, the owner, are a source of authoritative information. Whether we like to admit it or not, as humans, we tend to put more trust into well-presented sources and people (ever wonder why politicians are dressed so nicely!). As a result, we saw a jump in engagement (time on site, pages per session, etc).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The second reason I started with a website redesign is that, according to Google\u2019s Quality Rater Guidelines<\/a>, content should be created with a high level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T), which is especially important for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) pages that could potentially impact the health, financial stability, or safety of users. The design and user experience of the website contribute to its perceived trustworthiness, with a clear, user-friendly layout being beneficial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Almost immediately after redesigning my site and cleaning up the content (more on this below), I saw a significant lift in rankings and traffic. As a result, I now implement a redesign every time I buy a new website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Shows<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Lastly, a delightful surprise (that makes so much sense in hindsight) was that it was insanely easier to gather backlinks after my website upgrade. As I discuss below, outbound backlinking campaigns take much time and effort. You spend weeks emailing website owners for a guest post, and very few respond positively. Do you know what I learned about this process? My success rate increased after I updated the website! More details below, but remember this is an unintended benefit during your redesign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So put your best foot forward with a brand facelift, and you\u2019ll thank me later!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    How to Easily Redesign Your Website<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    A website redesign doesn\u2019t have to be hard or expensive. For my website redesign, I chose Thrive WordPress themes<\/a>, but there are so many different WP themes that you can choose one that suits you best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I also didn\u2019t want to spend hours tweaking each UI detail, so I hired a contractor on Upwork to do the work for me. I could write an entire post about hiring and managing virtual assistants (VA) but let me save you the time \u2014 I hired Saaransh Daga<\/a> to convert my crappy, old WordPress website into a new look using Thrive themes. Saaransh was super responsive and made sure the final product was in line with my vision. If you DM him, tell him Ben sent you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    2. Content Audit and Refresh<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    When acquiring a new website, you may find many useless posts and irrelevant content. It\u2019s not uncommon to see a site with hundreds of pages, but only a few pages account for most of the traffic. Buyers hate this because it\u2019s a liability \u2014 as soon as that page is downgraded, traffic will start to slip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    That\u2019s exactly what happened to me. The site I acquired had over 300 blog posts, but 10 of them accounted for almost 80% of the overall traffic! To make matters worse, I could tell many were guest posts or built for the sole purpose of creating a backlink for someone else!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Google<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Reducing the number of useless pages on your website is great for SEO. Google and other search engines allocate a crawl budget for each website. If your site has too many useless pages, you will eventually expend all your budget on content that doesn\u2019t matter. If search engine spiders are not crawling your most important pages often enough, they will miss important updates or content refreshes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Page Pruning and Content Cleanup<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    After I kicked off our website redesign, I started to go through each page on the site. I used ScreamingFrogSEO<\/a> and Siteliner<\/a> to scan my website. I then exported the results into a spreadsheet and manually went through each and every page to decide which pages to keep and which to kill. I also asked my VA to help. She reviewed each page as well, then marked \u201ckeep,\u201d \u201ckill,\u201d or \u201cmaybe\u201d \u2014 I checked her work and then made decisions on the \u201cmaybe\u201d pages.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As I deleted pages, I also had to set up 301 redirects. If there was any traffic going to the deleted pages, albeit small, or if any external backlinks were pointing to these pages, I didn\u2019t want them to hit 404 errors. Additionally, I had to update the internal linking structure because many of these pages had links pointing to them. More on this later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    My goal was to shed between \u2153 to \u00bd of the pages. I wanted the future buyer to know that each page was on the website for a reason. Each page served a purpose and was unique and original content. In the end, I went from 357 pages down to 215 pages \u2014 good enough for a first pass!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Internal Linking Strategy<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    I could spend an entire post on internal linking, but this topic has already been blogged about ad nauseam, so suffice it to say, I wanted to make sure my important pages had the most internal links pointing to them. I wanted my website laid out like a grocery store: similar items situated near each other and complementary items cross-promoted alongside each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The first step in creating an SEO-friendly internal linking structure was to understand which pages were important to my business and which were simply supportive or irrelevant. What I did was choose the top 25 to 50 pages that I wanted to rank and listed out the keywords for each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Next, I used ScreamingFrogSEO to visualize the internal linking structure of my site (after the scan runs, click the Internal tab, then sort by link count). I exported the output into a spreadsheet. I also did the same with Google Analytics for my traffic levels over the past 90 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Now that I had both the internal link counts and traffic levels exported into a spreadsheet, I was able to confirm whether my most important pages had the most internal links. If I found a page with insufficient links, I asked my VA to build up the link count. For example, notice how on this page for mortgage refinance<\/a> to pay off debt, I also linked to articles on debt consolidation and mortgage refinance. Building a multitiered internal linking strategy sends the message to Google which pages are most important around a specific topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I also checked the keywords that were being used for the internal links, and if they were off-topic, then I asked her to update the link anchor text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In the end, we added over 250 links and updated almost 200 anchor text links. The whole process took about three weeks, but we started to see a traffic increase for the linked pages within just a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    3. Backlinking Campaign and Strategy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Backlinking is my favorite part of preparing a website for sale. I also hate it at the same time. It\u2019s like going to the gym \u2014 dreading the experience walking in, but feels great on the way out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Why are backlinks important as you prepare to sell your website<\/a>? Because more links = better rankings = more traffic! As most know, backlinks are a key component in search engine rankings. Furthermore, most buyers want to purchase a rising star, not a falling knife. The buyer will do their due diligence, and if they see the number of referring domains decreasing, they may be spooked and interpret that as a website in neglect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I employed three backlinking strategies to test which would perform better. They were:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      \n
    1. skyscraper content<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. spray & pray<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. beg\/borrow\/steal<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      Each time I buy or start a new site, I like to implement multiple backlinking strategies since each niche is different and it\u2019s not one size fits all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      <\/div>\n\n\n\n

      Skyscraper Technique<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

      This famous backlinking strategy was popularized by Brian Dean of Backlinko<\/a>. The strategy goes like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n