My name is Justin Cooke, I am the co-founder of Empire Flippers where we help others buy, sell, and invest in online businesses.

Along with my business partner, Joe Magnotti, we started building and selling our own websites back in 2009-2010, but eventually pivoted to a brokerage & marketplace where we bring together sellers, buyers, and investors to close deals.

The company has grown quite a bit in the last few years - from $200K in sales in 2012 to nearly $10M in 2016 - enough to get us listed at #161 on the INC 5000 list. To date, we’ve helped broker more than $22M in online business sales and are on track to do around $18 - 20M in 2017.

We are a US based company, but run our business from SE Asia and we’ve grown our team by hiring “apprentices” and bringing them halfway around the world to join us. As they grow they become part of our core team.

Our management team is technically “location independent”, but we all get together every 3-4 months to spend a month working together. Our current get together is happening right now in Saigon, Vietnam. We just hired 4 new apprentices and are experiencing one of the biggest months in the company’s history with over $3 Million in online businesses sold.

I’m a fan of Reddit and the r/IAmA sub, so I’m really hoping to provide value and give back to the community. We broker almost every type of online business (Adsense, Amazon Affiliate, FBA, E-commerce, Private Affiliate, iOS apps, SaaS, etc.) and have seen thousands of unique and successful businesses. You can read more about the 11 most popular type of online business models here: https://empireflippers.com/11-popular-business-models-online/

Feel free to AMA about buying, selling or investing in online businesses, building management teams, starting a podcast, growing our business, interesting niches, living/working remotely, or anything else!

Proof:

Twitter

Shopify

Previous AMA

Edit 1:

Holy S***! - thanks for all the questions/comments/love - You all are awesome and the questions have been extremely interesting to answer- keep them coming! Sorry I haven't gotten to DM’s yet - I am going try to get to those tomorrow and focus on answering as many comments as I can today.

For anyone curious about selling, but wondering how much your site is worth, we've created this Valuation Tool. It will give you a "rough" estimate, but we actually use this to list/price the businesses with us, so it's pretty accurate.

If you know you're ready to sell, you can submit your site for sale with us here.

If you're wondering what types of business we have listed for sale, you can check out our marketplace and review the businesses we have for sale.

Edit #2

Quite a bit of our business success was due to creating high quality content that educates and expands our industry which is why we LOVE doing things like this - we really enjoy interacting with everyone here. I hope you're digging it as well.

Getting quite a few in-depth questions that we've covered elsewhere. For people really looking to find out more about entrepreneurship, our apprentice model, and our thoughts on business in general, feel free to check out The Empire Podcast here (Listen on our site, on iTunes, on Stitcher, etc.) It's our not-so-weekly show that I think you might dig.

Edit #3

Hey all - thank you so much for this amazing opportunity! It's after 2am here in Saigon, Vietnam right now, so I'm going to cut this off and go to bed tonight. I'll wake up tomorrow and try to get back to your questions - hopefully you'll find them helpful/useful.

I know plenty of you are new to business - particularly online business models - but we wrote a post that goes into some depth explaining how each of the 11 most popular online business models works.

It's for newbies mostly, but even if you have some experience you might find some value...especially when we talk about them from a buying/selling perspective.

You can check that post out here:

11 Most Popular Business Models Online

Again - thank you so much and I'll try to get back to more of your questions tomorrow!

Edit #4

Thank you all so much for stopping in - I had a blast doing this! I think I answered most of the questions you had, so I think it's time to shut this down. If you didn't get an answer I probably answered a similar question someplace else.

Want to get on a call with our team to discuss buying/selling online businesses?

Click here to schedule a call

Thanks again for your questions, comments, and insights - really appreciate it!