A long time ago, back in the good ol’ days of the Google internet, I learnt the power of affiliate marketing first hand. Where you could take advantage of an assumed message source separation - i.e. where the customer assumes the source of the message is not the advertiser. Prospects trust this more and it will have a far more powerful effect on persuading them to buy. You’ll learn about this and much more, in this interview with Blake Hutchison, CEO of Flippa.

You'll have to excuse the quality of the audio. I caught him in between sessions of a retail conference and we ducked into a nearby room to have a quick chat.

Flippa.com is a self described global online marketplace where you can buy and sell online businesses as well as digital assets. In this episode. We wanted to go deeper into the acquisition process. Assets could be an entire business, but also things like a social media account someone already created with a decent following. It could be a blog or even source code. So there's quite a few things that you can buy and sell on this marketplace. A lot of savvy marketers and business owners will prefer to purchase assets instead of going to the trouble of building them from scratch.

So we wanted to talk about the acquisition marketplace movement in general, but also about how Blake has seen acquisition being used strategically as a growth driver. And with thousands of transacted businesses over the years there’s no shortage of examples we tease out during the conversation.

Blake has been brought into the business recently, but he has a history of working with some of the top firms both in Australia and in Silicon Valley, from direct of sales BDM roles at Lonely Plat in San Francisco to head of partnerships at Xero, and a movement toward GM Chief Revenue Officer and then CEO at Flippa. And you’ll notice it becomes quickly obvious how competent he is about all things growth, marketing, sales, strategy and the tech startup process.

We talk about everything from the mistakes people make when buying businesses, the types of assets that are sold, and how people can leverage a really key competitive advantage that is often missed at larger, more bureaucratic firms which we both see as a key to modern growth in the years to come.

This episode really follows on nicely from the Peter Li episode, which covers more the corporate M&A space. This corporate market has a very different dynamic to this market which may have smaller transaction prices but is far larger in terms of total volume.

Until these online marketplaces came along, it was an underground market full of brokers and people in the know. Flippa and Microacquire are the platforms which are modernizing and scaling this market and there are many opportunities out there, easily within reach for those who are wishing to capitalize.