Thoughts on WPDesigner being sold
If you hadn’t caught the news yet, one of the most recognized sources for all things WordPress, WPDesigner (currently unaccessible for some reason) has been put up for sale by its founder and current owner, “Small Potato”. You can view the auction over at SitePoint.
As always when these things are revealed to the public, there are mixed reactions from the community around the site in question. Some are saying that Small Potato will be lucky to get in excess of $20,000 for the site, while others are cheering for potential buyers to hit the BIN-button and splash the $65,000 it would require.
Seeing how I am your self-declared friendly blogosphere expert on the art of buying and selling websites of all and any kind, I am going to share a few of my own opinions on this with you.
According to the auction description, WPDesigner.com has around 2,500 - 3,000 unique visitors every day, as well as a substantial amount of pageviews for each visitor. Small Potato only makes around $900 per month from the site. According to “traditional thinking”, the site would probably be valued somewhere between $10,500 - $21,000 (12 - 24 months of revenue).
Could it possibly be worth more? Yes, and I will be kind enough to list the three most important reasons for you.
Extremely targeted base of visitors. This means that you pretty much know exactly what your visitors are looking for, and this makes the job of determining how to make money much easier.
Huge (and I mean HUGE) growing potential. WPDesigner is already one of the most recognized brands in the WordPress scene, and it is the perfect place to start if you want to build the unofficial WordPress source. There are so many ways this site can be expanded and so much information that would propell it to a monster of a website in no time.
Untapped sources of revenue. Small Potato has pretty much made no effort at all to turn a profit from the site, and this is also probably why he will look back with regret on the sale a year or two from now when it is turning a yearly profit well above what he sold it for.
Combine these three points, and you will see that this website is a potential goldmine. But it is not for everyone however. The site is very much a work in progress as it stands right now, and thus not a site you can just purchase and sit back and watch the money stream right back in to your pocket.
I would say that anyone who is considering purchasing this site should have a clear vision of which direction they want to take it, and how they want to capitalize on its potential. And it will take work, a lot of work, probably much more work than one man is capable of doing, and such you would be in need of additional capital to hire one or more persons to help you out.
Personally I envision turning it into a full fledged community based around what Small Potato has build so far. Keep developing and releasing themes, free and “premium” (although I would probably restructure the $5 theme club), but expand in other areas. On top of that, spew out high quality tutorials and guides on everything WordPress, but in laymans terms, to seriously rival WordPress.com and its plethora of extremely useful but sometimes disorganized and hard-to-grasp information. And of top of that, as I said, focus on building a more visible and constant community, because it’s all about community these days.
But enough of my own daydreams, the point here is that for the right person(s), this site has the potential to become something truly special, and I would go as far as to say that it is well worth the Buy-It-Now pricetag. I’m not sure if it will sell for that much, because people / investors are generally not very interested in paying for potential as it often involves risk.