‘Flipping' URLs pays off for owner of GreatApps.com.
By Tina Traster
March 2, 2012 7:00 a.m.
Article from crain's new york business.com
For Rick Singer, a serial Web entrepreneur, the seed to a business concept begins with a good online domain name. In 2007, he purchased “RaiseCapital.com” and turned it into a site that pairs business startups and investors.
“People thought I was crazy to spend nearly $10,000 to buy a domain name,” said Mr. Singer. “I knew it would be a good investment—though it took several months to figure out what to do with it.”
A year later, he snapped up StockProfile.com, a site for over-the-counter companies to market themselves. He paid more than $10,000 for the URL. Last June, he sold StockProfile for $5 million worth of restricted stock to QED Connect, a publicly traded company. Now Mr. Singer is nearing a deal to sell
RaiseCapital.com.
But he's back at the drawing board again, this time building GreatApps.com, a Web site for app marketing. He bought the URLs GreatApps.com—and GreatApp.com, just to keep the similar name off the market—for $5,000 in the fall of 2010 and launched the site in 2011.
Mr. Singer figured the name was gold, but it took more than a year to develop and implement a business plan.
“There are more than a million apps for download,” said Mr. Singer. “You hear about the biggest success stories, like Angry Birds, but what about all the other apps? There was a void for marketing them.”
At GreatApps.com, app makers display their products to consumers. The site showcases 15 apps per day. Then the apps are in rotation on the site and in a searchable database for a year. App developers pay $995 annually to be listed and marketed on the site and in offline media. GreatApps promotes the apps through press releases on Marketwire, and via television commercials in regional markets.
“My whole philosophy boils down to this: a Web business should describe what a business does in whole,” said Mr. Singer, who is anticipating $3.5 million in annual revenue this year. “It's one thing if you have a $50 million budget for advertising and branding. Then you can have a dating site called Zoosk. I mean, what is Zoosk?. Otherwise, you want to name a Web business something people will intuitively search for—like ‘great apps.' ”
HITS
Mr. Singer is akin to a house flipper. He trawls for undervalued URLs, finds the ones that have the most potential, adds value and sells them. Like house flippers, he puts an awful lot of hard work into transforming a URL name into a viable business, but he's cracked the formula. Which is why he now owns 150 URLs. “Who knows?” Mr. Singer said wistfully. “The URL Social.com sold for $2.6 million in July—and that was just the name, not a business.”
MISSES
When Mr. Singer hired a firm to design his website, he thought everyone was in agreement. After the designers showed him a couple of prospective Web pages, he gave them a long leash to develop the rest of the site. But when it was done, it was wrong. “It was functional, but it appeared rushed and unprofessional,” he said, explaining that his opinion, of course, was subjective. He quickly realized he could not communicate his vision to the designers. Rather than waste more time, he hired a firm he'd previously worked with. It ended up costing him an additional $20,000 and a three-month delay in launching. He'd wanted to launch in September—well in advance of the holidays—but the site went live in December. “What I learned is that it's critical to be more involved in every step of the process,” said Mr. Singer. “The experience taught me to step back and take a look at the site in progress rather than waiting for it to be near completion and then want changes.”
Article from crain's new york business.com