If you were one of the 1,000 people who attended my How To Buy and Sell Sites on Flippa Webinar, then you got to hear Matt Mickiewicz gave some great tips on how to make money with the site selling service. I introduced Matt as the Flippa cofounder. However, I have a feeling many readers don’t know just how successful Matt really is. After this profile, you will.
At the age of 14, Matt Mickiewicz, became obsessed with design and read all he could find. He created a site call Sitepoint.com to share what he knew. Soon Matt was penning a column for Windows magazine and spending his high school lunch breaks selling Web ads in a Starbucks. He bought a BMW at 16 and his first home at 19.
Today, Matt heads a multimillion dollar Internet empire that includes the biggest webmaster site on the Net (Sitepoint), the biggest website buying and selling marketplace (Flippa), and the leading crowdsourcing platform for graphic design (99Designs). He runs it all from his home office in West Vancouver.
Last month, 99designs received a $35 million investment lead by Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalist, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. Jim Breyer is Silicon Valley’s current king maker. Everything he touches turns to gold. Accel investments hits include Facebook, Groupon, Admob and many others. I would not be shocked to see Matt’s name on the Forbes Billion List soon.
From Humble Beginnings
Matt started his Internet venture as a hobby. He was compiling useful links and resources related to web development and online marketing back in 1997 and put it up as a one-page site on Geocities. It quickly gained traction and popularity. On April 1, when the price of domain name registration at Network Solutions dropped from $100/2 years to $70/2 years, he decided to purchase the domain name Webmaster-Resources.com.
Unfortunately, the choice of domain name came to haunt him, as another website occupied WebmasterResources.com (without the hyphen). When Windows Magazine did an article about Matt’s site, they left out the hyphen. That was a sign to Matt that his domain is not a name for the longterm. Webmaster-Resources.com became Sitepoint.com in March 2000. The rest is history.
Even with Matt’s tremendous success, he still takes time out to help others. He took time out of his vacation to do the Flippa webinar with me. Matt is a great example on the power of the Internet. I look forward to doing another webinar with him in the future.