I acquired this site 1 month ago... and already made over $1,000

I've written about the acquisition already.

The key thing to note here is that the site wasn't generating any revenue at all and had only managed a small amount in its first 15 months.

What I want to share on IH is how I managed to build up the income to over $1,000 in the first month of taking the site over.

From the moment the deal was sealed I decided that I wanted to "re-launch" as quickly as possible: the site was generally in good order and mostly working, so with just a few minor adjustments I could make the announcement that I'd taken it over and start to grow it.

So I set myself the goal to do that in just one week after the acquisition completed.

In that week, although I wanted to make lots of functional changes and improvements, I limited the changes to only the absolutely necessary ones (mostly around integrations with third-party services like Stripe and analytics).

This ended up being mostly copy changes as well as the announcement post itself. So I didn't spend a whole week doing that! The rest of the time was spent doing two things:

1. Teasing my existing Twitter audience (the most active ones are mostly Laravel developers) with the news of the acquisition
2. Driving a few pre-sales by offering steep discounts on sponsor slots

There are a couple of lessons here for me:

1. Build something that taps into the audience you already have
2. Make sure you use the right avenues at your disposal to generate revenue, especially early on

What do I mean?

Well, as I'm already active in the Laravel community, it felt somewhat natural for me to acquire this site and offer a service back to that same community. I knew that I would find a few supporters among a number of my followers—people who I've met in person and keep in touch with—who would help spread the word naturally and help create a bit of buzz.

Even though I only had about 2.5k followers on Twitter at the time, I knew this would be the best way to start as I could see this tool being valuable to each and every one of them in some way. (I know 2.5k is a lot, but it's all relative... I don't see that much traction on my posts any more thanks to whatever is happening inside Twitter Towers.)

And as for using the correct avenues: one piece of data I was able to get access to during the acquisition was historical site traffic stats. Now the site itself is pretty new—it was first launched in August 2022—so I thought the traffic would be pretty low. But to my surprise, the team who built the site managed to get it to an average of around 5,000 page views per month.

That's not easy to do!

There's a start of something here

I know for a fact there will be plenty of brands even just within the Laravel community that will happily support the platform by paying to have their logo appear on the site.

So I decided to offer a blind early bird sponsorship and gave as much detail as I could via Twitter. Bear in mind this was before I had formally announced the acquisition and I was still teasing Twitter, not revealing the name of the site so that I could give myself time to get the changes I wanted to make all ready.

This is a tricky balance; most people want to know what they're buying before they spend their money. But in this case, I was able to provide enough of a carrot (a 50% discount) that I got a handful of customers straight away, almost as soon as I put the payment link online!

The payment link for the blind early bird product was done via a separate platform (in this case, LemonSqueezy) so that I didn't accidentally give the game away on the announcement.

I decided to handle all of this manually. There was no need for me to go and build a sponsors dashboard or complicated payment integration. All I needed was a way to get folks to sign up for a subscription and for me to put a link and logo on the pages.

They pay, I get their logo and link via email, and I manually add it to the site. Easy.

I focused my attention on making that process relatively straightforward, but it's still manual and that's fine. It's not happening every 5 minutes.

Some asked for annual billing so I set that up. This was a super easy way for me to get from $0 to $something. And it turned out that $something ended up being over $300.

Once the site is launched tho, I knew my focus needed to shift for a little while towards the quality of the profiles. I'd been looking through them over the months of watching the site and knew there were a lot of really terrible ones in there—no details, no personality, no evidence that they even belonged on the site.

Sadly, the previous owners hadn't had time to do the necessary review of profiles to make sure they were fit. Plus my standards and expectations for this site are quite a bit higher, I think. This meant a couple of things were needed:

• A complete overhaul of the review process - basically there wasn't one, so I needed to create that.
• A manual review of the almost 800 profiles that had already been submitted.

I felt strongly that setting the higher bar here was going to massively help my cause in trying to prove to businesses that might be looking for Laravel engineers that it's totally worth their investment in Laradir because the quality is really high.

This was also tricky though because I wanted to announce the acquisition before building any complex features like this. But, assuming I would get a reasonable amount of traffic from the relaunch and get more signups, I would potentially end up with even more profiles that weren't really fit for the site—I'd be chasing my own tail.

Well that leads me to promotion tactics! Which I'll need to do in another post as I'm already running out of space here. Hit like to let me know that you want to read more!